Everyone Needs at Least One Window — Isa Genzken

"One curve corresponds to the curvature of Mars on a scale of 1:1000, another curve to Venus on a scale of 1:40.000 [named after the Roman Gods of Love and War, probably alluding to her starting romance with Gerhard Richter ]"

"Something that bothers me with some of my students is that their works are so cold towards the viewer. I have always told the students that they have to imagine how the viewer sees something, too. Youve got to put yourself in the viewers shoes when you do something. Thats important to me. It may be complicated, but its important to me. Otherwise I find it too cold or too arrogant."

"they [her two shows in 2009] are so different, and actually it was a lot of work to make those two shows – I have never done that, two shows simultaneously. I worked on them for a whole year. It was very hard, because I was trying to get this balance between minimalism and something else beyond that – in dialogue with Minimalism, but with content. That was always the thing with minimalism, there was no content allowed of course, but only the thing in the space, that was what Sol LeWitt was always about, and Carl Andre – it was all about avoiding content. I was always very interested in this, right from the beginning, especially with my Ellipsoids [she made 1981 - 1983]. They look like minimalism, but in the end there is a lot going on there."

"..you see they hung my painting here [on her show Wind, 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called Basic Research, they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [[w:Gerhard] Richter|[Gerhard] Richter]] put one up in his studio for some time.. .But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while."

"Because Im a person who always has to do something. If I cannot do anything, Im in a very bad way. But really Im always working on something. And I always want to work, too. Well, the few artists I know really well, they are all so.. .Its a really bad block when you think, right, now Ive got to do art. It really is very important to learn that that is not the most important thing."

"Well, and the X-rays [X-Ray, 1991, black and white photograph].. .I was just interested in seeing what it looks like inside my head – and the idea that they could just examine the inside of my head like a globe. And then I photographed the facades in New York. [at the end of the 19-nineties].. .I did the books at the end of the nineties, and I did the facades shortly after that."