“I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself.”—— Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter’s seminal Cage paintings are named after American minimalist and experimental composer John Cage, whom Richter greatly admired and whose music heavily influenced the making of the original canvas paintings in 2006. In the 1960s, Cage performed a piece at the Dusseldorf Academy (where Richter was also studying), where he wrote with a pen that was attached to a microphone, generating a scratching sound when the pen moved across the paper. In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006, Richter discussed the influence of John Cage’s concepts of chance and coincidence in abstract painting and in his own work: “Despite all my technical experience, I cannot always exactly foresee what will happen when I apply or remove large amounts of paint with the scraper. Surprises emerge, disappointing ones, pleasant ones, which in any case represent changes to the painting – changes that I have to process first in my mind before I can continue” i.