Art Is Always To A Large Extent

I Remember That I Felt I Had To Avoid All These Sensational Photos, The Hanged Woman, The Man Who Shot Himself, And So Forth. I Collected A Great Deal Of Material, Including A Number Of Banal, Irrelevant Photos, And Then In The Course Of My Work I Came Back To The Very Pictures I Had Actually Wanted To Avoid, Which Summed Up The Various Stories.

Art Is Always To A Large Extent About Need, Despair And Hopelessness.

I Believe That The Quintessential Task Of Every Painter In Any Time Has Been To Concentrate On The Essential.

I Didn't Actually Know What The Protesters In The West Really Wanted. It Was Fantastic Here, So Much Freedom, And That Was What They Were Calling Musty, Middle-class, And Fascistic, A Bleak Period. Bleak Was What The Gdr Was, And It Alone Had Adopted, Almost Unchanged, Nazi Germany's Methods Of Intimidation And Ideas About Propaganda And The Use Of Force.

Of Course I Constantly Despair At My Own Incapacity, At The Impossibility Of Ever Accomplishing Anything, Of Painting A Valid, True Picture Or Even Knowing What Such A Thing Ought To Look Like. But Then I Always Have The Hope That, If I Persevere, It Might One Day Happen. And This Hope Is Nurtured Every Time Something Appears, A Scattered, Partial, Initial Hint Of Something Which Reminds Me Of What I Long For, Or Which Conveys A Hint Of It – Although Often Enough I Have Been Fooled By A Momentary Glimpse That Then Vanishes, Leaving Behind Only The Usual Thing.