Günther Förg

Untitled

‘Untitled’ (2007) is a vibrant example of Günther Förg’s iconic ‘Spot Paintings’, the last series the artist made before he was taken ill and stopped painting in 2009. The series celebrates the act of painting, drawing on Förg’s earlier painterly practice but reimagining his previous explorations in radically new and extraordinarily innovative ways. The expressive, dynamic brushstrokes and dashes of color which make up ‘Untitled’ 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 the large-scale canvas. Contrasting bright hues of fuchsia, orange and chartreuse green with intersections of mauve and grounding shades of brown, blue and black, this bustling composition reflects the conceptual principles that underpinned Förg’s practice: a formal purism, a sense of the artwork as object and an architectural, analytical interest in space.

One of the most significant German artists of the postwar generation, Förg is renowned for his experimental and radical oeuvre that engaged profoundly with the legacies of modernism. In his pioneering cross-disciplinary practice, Förg explored the language of abstraction, appropriating tropes from modern art and architecture. His work contains references to modernist masters such as Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Edvard Munch, all of whom Förg greatly admired. ‘Untitled’ is representative of Förg’s exceedingly original and witty reinterpretations of his artistic influences.

The ‘Spot Paintings’ were partially inspired by photographs Förg saw of Francis Bacon’s studio, which was covered in colorful blotches of paint created when the artist would wipe his brushes on the walls and door of the studio to remove excess paint. This method was all too familiar to Förg, who would frequently work out the value of a color by dabbing pigment from his brush to a paper or cloth surface. In this way, ‘Untitled’, as with his other ‘Spot Paintings’ enacts an irreverent reversal of artistic tradition. Commenting on Förg’s triumphant return to expressive painting in his ‘Spot Paintings’, curator Gavin Delahunty explains: ‘Each canvas conveys decades of attention to the history of art with an emphatic sureness. They are a return, in the sense that they resist the archives of his painterly practice to draw on previous compositional elements that held hidden potential. They are both old and new; and it is this tension that powers these works… His decades-long exercise of looking at gesture, color, line and composition had prepared him for the successful integration of all these elements into painting that had a directness, intensity, and carefree abandon that consolidated and confirmed his long-buried instinctive abilities’. [2]

[1.] Rudi Fuchs, quoted in Beatrix Ruf, Gavin Delahunty, Megan R. Luke (et al.), ‘Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty’, New Haven CT: Yale University Press with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Dallas Museum of Art, 2018, p. 220. [2.] Gavin Delahunty, ‘Günther Förg: Apparitions of Modernism’ in Beatrix Ruf, Gavin Delahunty, Megan R. Luke (et al.), ‘Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty’, New Haven CT: Yale University Press with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Dallas Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 72-73.