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Lot Essay
'I like very much the qualities of lead - the surface, the heaviness. Some of the paintings were completely painted, and you only experience the lead at the edges; this gives the painting a very heavy feeling - it gives the colour a different density and weight. In other works the materials would be explicitly visible as grounds. I like to react on things, with the normal canvas you often have to kill the ground, give it something to react against. With the metals you already have something - its scratches, scrapes' (G. Förg, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, reproduced at https://www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html).
A monumental painting of over two meters in height, Günther Förg's Untitled from 1988 is a prime example of the German artist's celebrated series of lead paintings. Comprised of two horizontal bands of intense vermilion red and a single band of cobalt blue between them, Untitled's impressive presence bares a perceptible materiality and form, two concepts central to Förg's oeuvre. The unique texture of lead, at once heavy, toxic by nature, and yet malleable, provides a distinct surface on which to explore the materiality of the medium. The seemingly uneven, wrinkled appearance of the lead is juxtaposed to the smooth, level application of paint, introducing a strange and wonderful tension between the so-called 'flatness' of the picture plane and the brushstroke. A relative outsider to the canon of contemporary German art, a generation after Gerhard Richter and aesthetically separate from the Neue Wilde school of the late seventies and eighties, Förg's artistic practice remains distinct; a crucial maverick in the conversation about post-war abstraction. With artworks housed in major museum collections such as the Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Förg's has been hailed as the 'painter's painter'.
In Untitled, the inconsistencies and irregularities of the lead act as the essential ground for the artist to disseminate his study of colour. With their crinkles, furrows and lines, the lead stimulates the chromatic planes, providing a feeling of depth, of an infinite field in which the red and blue can seep into. In many ways, Förg's lead paintings have been associated with the long-standing, modernist discussion of abstraction, and as such, of colour-from Piet Mondrian's concept of pure reality 'as a pictorial grid of intersecting straight lines' to Barnett Newman's famous 'zips' to Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bilds-Förg seems to simultaneously operate upon and exploit the basic tenants of this conversation. Förg once said: 'I think if we take a broader perspective we could say that, fundamentally as soon as we engage with painting, we have the same problems that faced those at the beginning of the century or even before; problems around colour, form, composition' (G. Förg, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, n.p.). Executed with a keen awareness of this history, Untitled undoubtedly references the masters of abstraction-Mondrian, Malevich, Newman, Rothko. Yet concurrently, the artwork is transformed and removed from their Romantic sentiment through Förg's choice of material. He delivers, instead, a work of irony, ambiguity and what appears to be an objective jab at the subjective.
However, the conceptual underpinnings and formal explorations present within Untitled are also motivated by other aspects of Förg's artist practice that branches beyond painting, including photography, sculpture and installation. His is a practice in which the various forms of media interact and collaborate with each other. For example, the lead paintings emerged in part from Förg's foray into photography, beginning in the early eighties. In many ways, his interest in the objective manner in which a camera documents architecture translates into a similar interest with the lead paintings: the serial nature of Untitled and all his lead paintings can be compared to a 'calculated row of snapshots...albeit focused upon some altogether non-objective world' (D. Anfam, quoted in Günther Förg, exh. cat., London, Thomas Dane Gallery, 2006-2007). If photography can elucidate the subjective world, with a clear objectivity, then abstract painting, a resoundingly subjective form of representation can too be discussed in these terms. As Förg has explained: 'I switch from one medium to another, from, say, painting to photography...if there is a key to all this diversity, then it is architecture. That is the thread that holds all these things together' (G. Förg, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, reproduced at https://www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html).
A monumental painting of over two meters in height, Günther Förg's Untitled from 1988 is a prime example of the German artist's celebrated series of lead paintings. Comprised of two horizontal bands of intense vermilion red and a single band of cobalt blue between them, Untitled's impressive presence bares a perceptible materiality and form, two concepts central to Förg's oeuvre. The unique texture of lead, at once heavy, toxic by nature, and yet malleable, provides a distinct surface on which to explore the materiality of the medium. The seemingly uneven, wrinkled appearance of the lead is juxtaposed to the smooth, level application of paint, introducing a strange and wonderful tension between the so-called 'flatness' of the picture plane and the brushstroke. A relative outsider to the canon of contemporary German art, a generation after Gerhard Richter and aesthetically separate from the Neue Wilde school of the late seventies and eighties, Förg's artistic practice remains distinct; a crucial maverick in the conversation about post-war abstraction. With artworks housed in major museum collections such as the Tate Modern, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Förg's has been hailed as the 'painter's painter'.
In Untitled, the inconsistencies and irregularities of the lead act as the essential ground for the artist to disseminate his study of colour. With their crinkles, furrows and lines, the lead stimulates the chromatic planes, providing a feeling of depth, of an infinite field in which the red and blue can seep into. In many ways, Förg's lead paintings have been associated with the long-standing, modernist discussion of abstraction, and as such, of colour-from Piet Mondrian's concept of pure reality 'as a pictorial grid of intersecting straight lines' to Barnett Newman's famous 'zips' to Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bilds-Förg seems to simultaneously operate upon and exploit the basic tenants of this conversation. Förg once said: 'I think if we take a broader perspective we could say that, fundamentally as soon as we engage with painting, we have the same problems that faced those at the beginning of the century or even before; problems around colour, form, composition' (G. Förg, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, n.p.). Executed with a keen awareness of this history, Untitled undoubtedly references the masters of abstraction-Mondrian, Malevich, Newman, Rothko. Yet concurrently, the artwork is transformed and removed from their Romantic sentiment through Förg's choice of material. He delivers, instead, a work of irony, ambiguity and what appears to be an objective jab at the subjective.
However, the conceptual underpinnings and formal explorations present within Untitled are also motivated by other aspects of Förg's artist practice that branches beyond painting, including photography, sculpture and installation. His is a practice in which the various forms of media interact and collaborate with each other. For example, the lead paintings emerged in part from Förg's foray into photography, beginning in the early eighties. In many ways, his interest in the objective manner in which a camera documents architecture translates into a similar interest with the lead paintings: the serial nature of Untitled and all his lead paintings can be compared to a 'calculated row of snapshots...albeit focused upon some altogether non-objective world' (D. Anfam, quoted in Günther Förg, exh. cat., London, Thomas Dane Gallery, 2006-2007). If photography can elucidate the subjective world, with a clear objectivity, then abstract painting, a resoundingly subjective form of representation can too be discussed in these terms. As Förg has explained: 'I switch from one medium to another, from, say, painting to photography...if there is a key to all this diversity, then it is architecture. That is the thread that holds all these things together' (G. Förg, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, reproduced at https://www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html).