Quotes

In your early paintings and drawings you often smudged the contours. Was that an expression of the difficulty of making a precise statement?
Yes, that too. That was also an attempt at getting rid of the personal touch. I wanted to make it as anonymous as a photo. But it was perhaps also the wish for perfection, the unapproachable, which then means loss of immediacy. Something is missing then, though; that is why I gave that up.

Do you rate your work on paper as highly as the paintings?
Well, to be honest I must say it took a long time. It's only since 1976 that I have allowed myself to do that sort of small work. Before I insisted that I should be able to theoretically justify everything I did. That theory wasn't entirely correct, but I did often believe in it. Drawing or painting on paper is more impulsive than painting on canvas. It doesn't take so much effort, and you can simply throw away anything you don't like, whereas large canvases take much more effort and time. I found that the directness of the works on paper led to randomness and virtuosity. I didn't want any of that.

As the self-portrait shows, the first watercolours were created during the time in Dresden?
That was before the Academy, when I was 17. At the time I worked a lot in watercolours, but then, at the Academy, drawing and oil-painting were taught, not watercolouring. I also can't remember that anyone at all did watercolours.

For the first time, a comprehensive collection of your sketches is being shown, in Winterthur, accompanied by a catalogue of these works. Before this, I rarely came across any Richter sketches.
Me neither. Unlike the photography and prints, I never catalogued, kept track of or exhibited the sketches. I sold some occasionally, but never saw myself as a graphic artist. They became more important to me thanks to the exhibition, however, and I realized that these drawings were quite interesting after all.