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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
Towering above the spectator with a vast height of over three metres, this impressive work by Günther Förg is a magnificent example of the artist’s lead paintings. The most significant and important pieces in the artist’s oeuvre, similar works are now housed in some of the world’s most prestigious collections (including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Tate, London). The surface of the lead, affixed to a supporting panel, is smooth and ice-cold in its metallic gleam, characterised by a captivating oxidised patina. Seductively pure in character, with a seam running vertically down its centre, the material propels us into a meditative, melancholic state of solemnity. Förg’s intervention covers the top fifth of the lead, where a coat of acrylic paint clouds the surface in a rich, deep purple. The conversation between lead ground and painted quadrilateral manifests an order and magnitude awesome to behold, like a shrouded, mystical heaven surmounting a frozen world.
Working with lead enabled Förg to experiment with patina on a monumental, albeit flat scale. His lead paintings, veiled by small segments of acrylic paint, are majestic and titanic characters of sublime beauty and weight. ‘I like very much the qualities of lead’, Förg professed in 1997, ‘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 2 September 2017]). In Untitled, the dynamic, caustic surface of the lead injects life into the camouflage of acrylic paint, whilst the immediate contrast between the incandescent silver of the lead and its overpainted hue casts the object as a monolith of serenity and silence.
Although Förg’s work initially seems to allude to a spirituality or mysticism inherent in the work of other major twentieth-century abstractionists – Mark Rothko’s transcendental fugs of colour and form or Barnett Newman’s cosmos-splicing existentialism – the German painter is concerned with the asceticism of abstraction alone. Pronouncing that ‘abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’, Förg encourages the viewer to fixate on the beauty of pureness encompassing material, composition and colour (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg, Paintings on Lead, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2006, p. 6). Furthermore, the strong rectilinear nature of this piece as object, along with its compositional facets, gives the work an almost architectonic function, transforming the space in which it is placed both physically and atmospherically. With this spectacular physical stature – a vessel for chromatic concord and luminous materiality – Untitled plunges the viewer into abstraction’s deep and enrapturing abyss.
Towering above the spectator with a vast height of over three metres, this impressive work by Günther Förg is a magnificent example of the artist’s lead paintings. The most significant and important pieces in the artist’s oeuvre, similar works are now housed in some of the world’s most prestigious collections (including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Tate, London). The surface of the lead, affixed to a supporting panel, is smooth and ice-cold in its metallic gleam, characterised by a captivating oxidised patina. Seductively pure in character, with a seam running vertically down its centre, the material propels us into a meditative, melancholic state of solemnity. Förg’s intervention covers the top fifth of the lead, where a coat of acrylic paint clouds the surface in a rich, deep purple. The conversation between lead ground and painted quadrilateral manifests an order and magnitude awesome to behold, like a shrouded, mystical heaven surmounting a frozen world.
Working with lead enabled Förg to experiment with patina on a monumental, albeit flat scale. His lead paintings, veiled by small segments of acrylic paint, are majestic and titanic characters of sublime beauty and weight. ‘I like very much the qualities of lead’, Förg professed in 1997, ‘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 2 September 2017]). In Untitled, the dynamic, caustic surface of the lead injects life into the camouflage of acrylic paint, whilst the immediate contrast between the incandescent silver of the lead and its overpainted hue casts the object as a monolith of serenity and silence.
Although Förg’s work initially seems to allude to a spirituality or mysticism inherent in the work of other major twentieth-century abstractionists – Mark Rothko’s transcendental fugs of colour and form or Barnett Newman’s cosmos-splicing existentialism – the German painter is concerned with the asceticism of abstraction alone. Pronouncing that ‘abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’, Förg encourages the viewer to fixate on the beauty of pureness encompassing material, composition and colour (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg, Paintings on Lead, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2006, p. 6). Furthermore, the strong rectilinear nature of this piece as object, along with its compositional facets, gives the work an almost architectonic function, transforming the space in which it is placed both physically and atmospherically. With this spectacular physical stature – a vessel for chromatic concord and luminous materiality – Untitled plunges the viewer into abstraction’s deep and enrapturing abyss.