I Often Need A Long Time To

Art Is The Ideal Medium For Making Contact With The Transcendental, Or At Least For Getting Close To It.

Suddenly, I Saw It In A New Way, As A Picture That Offered Me A New View, Free Of All The Conventional Criteria I Had Always Associated With Art. It Had No Style, No Composition, No Judgment. It Freed Me From Personal Experience. For The First Time, There Was Nothing To It: It Was Pure Picture. That's Why I Wanted To Have It, To Show It - Not Use It As A Means To Painting But Use Painting As A Means To Photography.

What Counts Isn't Being Able To Do A Thing, It's Seeing What It Is. Seeing Is The Decisive Act, And Ultimately It Places The Maker And The Viewer On The Same Level.

But I Have A Problem With The Term 'light'. I Never In My Life Knew What To Do With That. I Know That People Have Mentioned On Some Occasions That 'richter Is All About Light', And That 'the Paintings Have A Special Light', And I Never Knew What They Were Talking About. I Was Never Interested In Light. Light Is There And You Turn It On Or You Turn It Off, With Sun Or Without Sun. I Don't Know What The 'problematic Of Light' Is. I Take It As A Metaphor For A Different Quality, Which Is Similarly Difficult To Describe. Good.

The Atlas Belongs To The Lenbachhaus In Munich - It's Long Since Ceased To Belong To Me. Occasionally I Run Across It Somewhere, And I Think It's Interesting Because It Looks Different Each Time.