Günther Förg

Günther Förg was a prolific painter, sculptor, graphic designer and photographer whose daring conceptual works incorporate and critique tropes of the sprawling movement known as modernism. This exhibition, in the North Gallery of the London space, displays Förg’s Spot Paintings, the artist’s final series made between 2005 – 2010 before he stopped painting in 2010 after suffering a stroke.

In these works, the brushstroke itself becomes the main protagonist, representing an ultimate return to expressive painting, indicating a completion of sorts—a full-circle arrival at painting as a synthesis of experimentation, rooted in art history.

The expressive, dynamic brushstrokes and dabs of color which make up this body of work convey a playful, chromatic harmony. Förg has transformed the previous lattice structures from his renowned series of Grid Paintings into rhythmic, gestural marks that appear to float across monumental canvas, doing away with any previous sense of order.

Upon closer inspection, some of the brushstrokes are spontaneous and others are controlled, slow and precise, as the pursuit of pure abstraction required Förg to measure himself, to ensure the brushstrokes remained definitively abstract. The art historian and curator Rudi Fuchs describes this effect: ‘The different movements of brush that make up the painting, are subtly different in manufacture. They have, as it were, different formal temperaments. Decisive, hesitant, fragile, tentative, abrupt, compact. One cannot even begin to appraise the effect of floating, dancing colours.’ The variations in the brushstrokes work to avoid any sense of a recognisable pattern, as Rudi Fuchs continues to say, ‘hanging there, fuzzy as they all are, their precise role is to avoid any recognizable shape and to be utterly and truly abstract.’