How Gerhard Richter might approach Art & Design
Design. A curious word. One implies intention, a plan, a clear path from A to B. My own path is rarely so straight. It’s a matter of looking, yes, but also of fumbling, of letting the paint—or whatever material I’m wrestling with—have its say. The photograph is the model, sometimes, a ghost of something that once was, but then the painting asserts itself, and the model blurs, recedes. It becomes something else entirely.
This idea of ‘design’… it suggests control. But art, for me, is often about the loss of control. It’s about uncertainty. When I’m working, I often don’t know what I’m doing. The painting paints itself, in a way. There’s a dialogue, a negotiation. If something is too ‘designed,’ too perfectly conceived beforehand, doesn’t that kill the life of it? Doesn’t it reduce the possibility of surprise, of accident, of that strange beauty that arises from imperfection?
Perhaps design, in its purest sense, is an attempt to banish ambiguity. But ambiguity is the very air I breathe as an artist. The way light falls, the way a memory shifts, the way a stroke of paint can disrupt everything… these are not things to be neatly designed. They are to be observed, embraced, even when they lead you down unexpected paths. To impose too rigid a structure, too definitive a purpose, feels like a betrayal of the inherent, messy reality of things. It’s a matter of seeing, not of dictating. And seeing, truly seeing, is an act of constant questioning, never of final pronouncements.
Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Gerhard Richter’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.