No one who looks at my paintings can see whether a painting is upside down or not anymore. I've made or developed so many image models that some people have given up trying to keep track of me. But others have only one or two ways of doing things and are successful with that.

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

As an artist, I have been a risk-taker. And I've done a lot of different things. I don't make it easy for people. Identification is difficult. One doesn't recognize my art right away.

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

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 depression and under great pressure. My paintings are battles, if you will.

In a place like the Guggenheim, I would like to be a representative of arte povera. This would be my ideal.

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