I have always had the feeling that other people are too stupid to discover interesting things. That's why I do it myself. I think of collecting as a ….

Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker..

An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object..

I don't paint over my paintings with black paint. I paint black paintings. It isn't because I'm sad, just as I didn't paint red paintings yesterday b….

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms..

You dig in and you find something..

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface..

Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption..

I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fight….

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does..

A painter doesn't need any talent. In fact, it's better not to have it..

As a human being, I am a citizen, but as an artist, I am asocial..

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture..

I dont want to create a monster; I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition, ….

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German..

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised….

The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ….

In the beginning, the energy involved to create came from my reaction to the work of other artists. The force behind this was aggression. The art tha….

I remember that Michael Werner told me about a famous collector, and Michael set up an appointment for us to meet. This man looked around the room an….

You cannot deny your origins: I love Kirchner more than Matisse, although Matisse was a greater artist. That isn't to do with nationality. It's a str….

All German painters have a neurosis with Germany's past: war, the postwar period most of all, East Germany. I addressed all of this in a deep depress….