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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).
Monumental in scale, Günther Förg's Untitled, 1994 is a prime example of the German artist's celebrated series of lead paintings. Comprised of two vertical bands of intense red and raw lead, it exemplifies the artist’s pioneering investigations into materiality and form. The unique texture of lead, at once heavy, toxic by nature, and yet malleable, is juxtaposed with the smooth, level application of paint, creating a compelling tension between the so-called 'flatness' of the picture plane and the brushstroke. 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 can seep into. 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 chapter in the development of post-War abstraction.
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’. However, in contrast to the almost spiritual aesthetic championed Abstract Expressionist forbears, works such as Untitled refuse any transcendental claim. 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, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, reproduced at https://www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther0Forg.html).
Monumental in scale, Günther Förg's Untitled, 1994 is a prime example of the German artist's celebrated series of lead paintings. Comprised of two vertical bands of intense red and raw lead, it exemplifies the artist’s pioneering investigations into materiality and form. The unique texture of lead, at once heavy, toxic by nature, and yet malleable, is juxtaposed with the smooth, level application of paint, creating a compelling tension between the so-called 'flatness' of the picture plane and the brushstroke. 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 can seep into. 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 chapter in the development of post-War abstraction.
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’. However, in contrast to the almost spiritual aesthetic championed Abstract Expressionist forbears, works such as Untitled refuse any transcendental claim. 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.