“When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over (about eight years ago), I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, and therefore painting. Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations; it is really neither visible nor invisible.
“Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible. To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it.
“The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour. Finally; this kind of reductionist painting fascinates me in general, because I believe that it is a highly scrupulous and cautious attempt to achieve correctness, or rather definitiveness, in painting; that it pursues a quality which tends towards the valid and the universal. This seems to me important, in the face of a mindless, proliferating productivity that becomes less and less definitive.”
(Gerhard Richter, ‘Letter to E. de Wilde’, 1975, quoted in H.-U. Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, pp. 82 – 83).