- Robert Mangold: I think the public still views abstraction with a certain kind of hostility, and I guess you can say that the artist by choosing the be abstract is putting this barrier between him and the public. But I don't see it that way. I mean, my feeling about abstract painting is exactly the opposite of the idea of painting as an object. It is an object, it's a kind of flat object, and it has this kind of presentation. But it's also a kind of gateway, in a funny way, for mentally and physically and emotionally... to enter into and to play with.
- Gerhard Richter: I can't see the history of abstract painting as an invention of modern times because I think it has always been around. Buildings are abstract, patterns and ornaments are abstract, and therefore abstraction is quite normal for me. It has always been a part of our work, our creative work.
- Philip Taaffe: I think I do what I do, because of all the possibilities, of all the options that are available to an artist, this seemed to be the most authentic, and the most pleasurable, and the most demanding, the most challenging, the most infinite means of arriving at something, getting a result that I felt had a unique cultural meaning and could operate within society as a constructive force.
- Jonathan Lasker: Abstraction, first of all, insists upon the reality of the object itself. It says you are looking at paint on canvas. It doesn't take anything for granted, and it insists on the viewer coming to the painting itself. And then once the viewer is looking at the painting, then the viewer can begin to have a discourse with the image.
- Richard Serra: The thing about abstraction as it differentiates, say, from figurative work, is that figurative work deals with some sort of objective qualification of things that exist in the world. A lot of figurative work actually tries through its content to evoke feeling. And I think because it evokes feeling from something that's representational, it's much easier to understand, because it can illustrate or depict an idea that everyone can immediately plug into.