I Believe That Art Has A Kind

I Started Doing 'figures', Then, One Day, All Of A Sudden, I Started Doing Abstraction. And Then I Started Doing Both. But It Was Never Really A Conscious Decision. It Was Simply A Question Of Desire. In Fact, I Really Prefer Making Figurative Work, But The Figure Is Difficult. So To Work Around The Difficulty I Take A Break And Paint Abstractly. Which I Really Like, By The Way, Because It Allows Me To Make Beautiful Paintings.

Composition Is A Side Issue. Its Role In My Selection Of Photographs Is A Negative One At Best. By Which I Mean That The Fascination Of A Photograph Is Not In Its Eccentric Composition But In What It Has To Say: Its Information Content. And, On The Other Hand, Composition Always Also Has Its Own Fortuitous Rightness.

My Pictures Are Devoid Of Objects; Like Objects, They Are Themselves Objects. This Means That They Are Devoid Of Content, Significance Or Meaning, Like Objects Or Trees, Animals, People Or Days, All Of Which Are There Without A Reason, Without A Function And Without A Purpose. This Is The Quality That Counts. Even So, There Are Good And Bad Pictures.

With A Brush You Have Control. The Paint Goes On The Brush And You Make The Mark. From Experience You Know Exactly What Will Happen. With The Squeegee You Lose Control.

There Was No Special Event That Made Me Decide. I Had Collected Some Photos And The Idea Was In The Back Of My Mind For A Long Time. It Was Growing And Growing, So Finally I Said, 'i Must Paint This.' I Come From East Germany And Am Not A Marxist, So Of Course At The Time I Had No Sympathy For The Ideas, Or For The Ideology That These People Represented. I Couldn't Understand, But I Was Still Impressed. Like Everyone, I Was Touched. It Was An Exceptional Moment For Germany.