"I was enormously impressed by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.. ..the sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason I left the GDR [ German Democratic Republic ]. I realized that something was wrong with my whole way of thinking.. .I lived my life with a group of people who laid claim to a moral aspiration, who wanted to bridge a gap.. .And so the way we thought, and what we wanted for our own art, was all about compromise."