"I was called a formalist, and in East Germany that meant you could be denied a chance to exhibit. So I knew I had to leave , not because I was worried about the controversy but because I knew the controversy was about a bad picture. It wasn't good enough to be controversial. I was getting all the wrong reactions. Friends said the work was wonderful, and the attacks made it seem more important than it was. I had started to earn money with the murals. I earned enough to get a car. That was a big deal. So it was not easy to give up. But I knew I had to leave."

“As far as the surface is concerned – oil on canvas, conventionally applied – my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting . On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.”

“I am primarily painting from photographs these days , in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product , I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject , it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo.”

“To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.. .Painting is another form of thinking.”

“We could really just speak about painting. The main thing was about the surface of color or the proportion of color. It was impossible for me to talk to Sigmar Polke about the opacity of color. With Palermo, yes. We supported each other, we comforted each other a little bit. We thought this really could not be true that everything was supposed to be over , and our art was not relevant.”

“The first impulse towards painting, or toward art in general, stems from the need to communicate, the effort to fix one's own vision, to deal with appearances Without this, all work would be pointless and unjustified, like Art for Art's Sake.”

“As a role that everyone has. I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.”