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Lot Essay
Painted in 1987, Günther Förg’s Untitled is a resplendent example of the artist’s lead paintings, the hallmark of his practice. The large work is divided into two harmonious planes: across the top is a warm, inviting yellow while below lies a rich, forest green. With its horizontal orientation, Untitled conjures a luminously abstract landscape: sky and land, sunshine and earth. Förg began his leaded paintings in the 1980s, and these works represent the most significant strand of his prolific practice; Untitled is a captivating early work from the series. By applying paint directly to such a volatile surface, Förg’s pigments were transformed indelibly; reactions to the caustic ground produced a stunning, and uncontrollable, chromatic variability. Using lead, the artist explained, gave ‘the colour a different density and weight... 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). In Untitled, these fluctuating, lustrous bands together suggest a depth that reaches towards the horizon.
Although Förg’s compositions appear to resemble the Colour Field paintings of artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, works like Untitled refuse any transcendental claim. Indeed, Förg purposefully distanced himself from the near-spiritual ethos championed by the American Abstract Expressionists, explaining that ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost ... For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg: Painting Sculpture Installation, exh. cat., Newport Harbor Art Museum, Santa Ana, California,1989, p. 6) Förg instead belonged to a generation of artists for whom abstraction no longer needed to be defended; it was simply one form of expression amongst many, and this experimental vision was the central theme of his 2018 exhibition A Fragile Beauty held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Dallas Museum of Art. By embracing the mercurial, Förg recuperated abstraction as a site of aesthetic and material inquiry. Indeed, Untitled conveys a powerful physicality subtly articulated through its variegated surface. The painting is a poetics of colour and form, rich, vivid and endlessly tangible.
Although Förg’s compositions appear to resemble the Colour Field paintings of artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, works like Untitled refuse any transcendental claim. Indeed, Förg purposefully distanced himself from the near-spiritual ethos championed by the American Abstract Expressionists, explaining that ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost ... For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg: Painting Sculpture Installation, exh. cat., Newport Harbor Art Museum, Santa Ana, California,1989, p. 6) Förg instead belonged to a generation of artists for whom abstraction no longer needed to be defended; it was simply one form of expression amongst many, and this experimental vision was the central theme of his 2018 exhibition A Fragile Beauty held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Dallas Museum of Art. By embracing the mercurial, Förg recuperated abstraction as a site of aesthetic and material inquiry. Indeed, Untitled conveys a powerful physicality subtly articulated through its variegated surface. The painting is a poetics of colour and form, rich, vivid and endlessly tangible.