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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, quoted in D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, http:/www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html [accessed 9 September 2014]).
Executed in 1992, Untitled is an exquisite example of the lead paintings that constitute an important chapter in Günther Förg’s multi-disciplinary career. Two opaque blue lines, parallel and straight, hover upon a shimmering silver ground: a vast expanse of shifting tonal density that quivers as its catches the light. More than just a convenient support, lead was treated by the artist as an integral part of the work, placed on the same level as paint. Expressing his fascination for the material, Förg explained: ‘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, quoted in D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, http:/www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html [accessed 9 September 2014]). With its crinkles, furrows and lines, the lead surface becomes an infinite field of texture and depth, whose inconsistencies and instabilities work in counterpoint with its imposed geometric forms. In Untitled, the lead is allowed to write its own visual story: oxidised by the atmosphere and redefined by its surroundings, it becomes a living, breathing surface.
Although reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s ‘zip’ lines, works such as Untitled refuse any transcendental claim. Indeed, Förg consciously distanced himself from the spiritual abstraction championed by the American Abstract Expressionists. Distinguishing his aims from those of his predecessors, Förg explained: ‘Newmann and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost. With Newman, one sees that in Broken Obelisk, Stations of the Cross and the design for a synagogue; with Rothko, in his paintings for the chapel in Houston. For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg: Painting / Sculpture /Installation, exh. cat., 1989, Newport Beach, p. 6). Echoing Frank Stella’s famous words, ‘what you see is what you see’, Förg thus belonged to a post-modern generation for whom abstraction was no longer a means of expression that needed to be defended, sublimated and theorised; rather, it had become one means of expression among many others. Courageously renouncing painting’s long-standing metaphysical claim, works such as Untitled proclaim the factual quality of Förg’s abstraction, while commemorating his lasting fascination with the dark, complex materiality of lead.
(G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, http:/www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html [accessed 9 September 2014]).
Executed in 1992, Untitled is an exquisite example of the lead paintings that constitute an important chapter in Günther Förg’s multi-disciplinary career. Two opaque blue lines, parallel and straight, hover upon a shimmering silver ground: a vast expanse of shifting tonal density that quivers as its catches the light. More than just a convenient support, lead was treated by the artist as an integral part of the work, placed on the same level as paint. Expressing his fascination for the material, Förg explained: ‘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, quoted in D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, http:/www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html [accessed 9 September 2014]). With its crinkles, furrows and lines, the lead surface becomes an infinite field of texture and depth, whose inconsistencies and instabilities work in counterpoint with its imposed geometric forms. In Untitled, the lead is allowed to write its own visual story: oxidised by the atmosphere and redefined by its surroundings, it becomes a living, breathing surface.
Although reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s ‘zip’ lines, works such as Untitled refuse any transcendental claim. Indeed, Förg consciously distanced himself from the spiritual abstraction championed by the American Abstract Expressionists. Distinguishing his aims from those of his predecessors, Förg explained: ‘Newmann and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost. With Newman, one sees that in Broken Obelisk, Stations of the Cross and the design for a synagogue; with Rothko, in his paintings for the chapel in Houston. For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg: Painting / Sculpture /Installation, exh. cat., 1989, Newport Beach, p. 6). Echoing Frank Stella’s famous words, ‘what you see is what you see’, Förg thus belonged to a post-modern generation for whom abstraction was no longer a means of expression that needed to be defended, sublimated and theorised; rather, it had become one means of expression among many others. Courageously renouncing painting’s long-standing metaphysical claim, works such as Untitled proclaim the factual quality of Förg’s abstraction, while commemorating his lasting fascination with the dark, complex materiality of lead.