Based On Mixtures Of The Three Primary

Photography Has Almost No Reality; It Is Almost A Hundred Per Cent Picture. And Painting Always Has Reality: You Can Touch The Paint; It Has Presence; But It Always Yields A Picture - No Matter Whether Good Or Bad. That's All The Theory. It's No Good. I Once Took Some Small Photographs And Then Smeared Them With Paint. That Partly Resolved The Problem, And It's Really Good - Better Than Anything I Could Ever Say On The Subject.

Talk About Painting: There's No Point. By Conveying A Thing Through The Medium Of Language, You Change It. You Construct Qualities That Can Be Said, And You Leave Out The Ones That Can't Be Said But Are Always The Most Important.

My Work Has So Much To Do With Reality That I Wanted To Have A Corresponding Rightness. That Excludes Painting In Imitation.

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.

Art Should Be Serious, Not A Joke. I Dont Like To Laugh About Art.