Abstraktes Bild (759-2)

"Essential to Richter's process of making a painting is that it not be executed in one go. There is room for spontaneity, as in Informel and Abstract Expressionism, but the purposefulness of those earlier movements evades Richter, as does their practitioners' confidence that as long as they worked as spontaneously as possible, good pictures would result. Time is needed, and pauses for reflection after each move before being able to paint further: the strategy of detour around expressive outbursts so as to be able to 'overleap my own shadow'. The process must be uninterrupted so as to resist the painting's being dominated by one creative direction or settling into a single mode. Always caution is required and a stance of 'passivity' before the activity of painting, precisely to pursue 'a strategy of avoidance' of what can be conceived ao as interesting, logical, absurd, fantastic, intelligent. What is sought is something else: 'a pictorial quality that the intelligence cannot fabricate'" (R. Nasgaard, Gerhard Richter Paintings, London 1988, p. 108).