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Lot Essay
‘Förg’s artistic concept is marked by velocity and dexterity and an unambiguous approach. He works in series and sequences of pictures. Since his early orientation with Twombly and Palermo during his studies at Munich Academy, he has progressively expanded his artistic area of expertise. Förg does not invoke, but uses his work more as a reminiscence, a memory of modernity, whose artefacts flow out of stream of forgetfulness wrung from his raw and open work process, and through its stubborn Anti-Formalism, allows the view a participating and unexploited gaze’
(E. Schneider, quoted in, Förg, exh. cat., Kunsthaus Bregenz, Cologne, 2001, unpaged).
Comprised of horizontal and vertical bands of intense vermilion red, tangerine orange and yellow, Förg’s Untitled from 2003, is interrupted, and cut up by, thin bands of dense black along with the manifestation of the canvas underneath, its presence forced upon us through the gaps in colour. Untitled’s impressive, striking existence bares a perceptible materiality; there is a literalness to the paint and composition despite its hand-painted quality. A strange and wonderful tension occurs between the so-called ‘flatness’
of the picture plane and the brushstroke. ‘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, unpaged.).
Although 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 undoubtedly executes his paintings with a keen awareness of history, referencing 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’ – Förg seems to simultaneously operate upon, and exploit, the basic tenants of this conversation. Yet concurrently, one sees within Förg’s oeuvre, and indeed within Untitled, the artwork transformed and removed from their Romantic sentiment; a crucial maverick, he delivers, instead, a work of irony, ambiguity and what appears to be an objective jab at the subjective. Förg conceives a style of painting which champions the painting itself, the objective fact of painting and its presence within our physical world.
(E. Schneider, quoted in, Förg, exh. cat., Kunsthaus Bregenz, Cologne, 2001, unpaged).
Comprised of horizontal and vertical bands of intense vermilion red, tangerine orange and yellow, Förg’s Untitled from 2003, is interrupted, and cut up by, thin bands of dense black along with the manifestation of the canvas underneath, its presence forced upon us through the gaps in colour. Untitled’s impressive, striking existence bares a perceptible materiality; there is a literalness to the paint and composition despite its hand-painted quality. A strange and wonderful tension occurs between the so-called ‘flatness’
of the picture plane and the brushstroke. ‘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, unpaged.).
Although 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 undoubtedly executes his paintings with a keen awareness of history, referencing 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’ – Förg seems to simultaneously operate upon, and exploit, the basic tenants of this conversation. Yet concurrently, one sees within Förg’s oeuvre, and indeed within Untitled, the artwork transformed and removed from their Romantic sentiment; a crucial maverick, he delivers, instead, a work of irony, ambiguity and what appears to be an objective jab at the subjective. Förg conceives a style of painting which champions the painting itself, the objective fact of painting and its presence within our physical world.