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Lot Essay
‘Günther Förg is not an abstract painter; he is a romantic expressionist, the language of forms laconically borrowed, the colours singing ponderously, like a bronze church bell’ – Rudi Fuchs
With a medley of marks and painterly gesticulations, Günther Förg’s Untitled, 2009, summons a chromatic luminosity. Between 2007 and 2009, during a period of great critical acclaim, Förg produced a new series of playful and enthusiastic abstractions, to which the present work belongs; Untitled is one of the last paintings the artist ever made. Across the white expanse of the present work, Förg scribbled and splashed a flurry of prismatic forms which effervesce and dissolve into a lyrical composition of colour. The artist was sensitive to chromatic rhythms, which art historian Rudi Fuchs called ‘thoroughly unique’ writing, ‘I believe that he goes about the selection of colours in an instinctive and impulsive manner; that is to say, that he relies on his natural dialect. The colours in Förg’s paintings have stared at me for years, while I remained unable to pinpoint them’ (R. Fuchs, Günther Förg, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1995, p. 45). Employing an abstracted idiom influenced by Modern artists including Edvard Munch and Mark Rothko, Förg devoted his practice to the exploration of colour. Describing this lifelong dedication, critic Lloyd Wise wrote that Förg’s was a career ‘unencumbered by the twin deadweights of irony and melancholy and filled with a serious and sustained (though never fully credulous) commitment to the twentieth century’s endlessly generative legacy’ (L. Wise, ‘Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty’, Artforum, May 2018). Förg was captivated by colour’s materiality and Untitled bears witness to this experimentation. The dappled canvas brims with new harmonies, a spray of tonalities that seem to arise directly from the surface of Untitled itself.
With a medley of marks and painterly gesticulations, Günther Förg’s Untitled, 2009, summons a chromatic luminosity. Between 2007 and 2009, during a period of great critical acclaim, Förg produced a new series of playful and enthusiastic abstractions, to which the present work belongs; Untitled is one of the last paintings the artist ever made. Across the white expanse of the present work, Förg scribbled and splashed a flurry of prismatic forms which effervesce and dissolve into a lyrical composition of colour. The artist was sensitive to chromatic rhythms, which art historian Rudi Fuchs called ‘thoroughly unique’ writing, ‘I believe that he goes about the selection of colours in an instinctive and impulsive manner; that is to say, that he relies on his natural dialect. The colours in Förg’s paintings have stared at me for years, while I remained unable to pinpoint them’ (R. Fuchs, Günther Förg, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1995, p. 45). Employing an abstracted idiom influenced by Modern artists including Edvard Munch and Mark Rothko, Förg devoted his practice to the exploration of colour. Describing this lifelong dedication, critic Lloyd Wise wrote that Förg’s was a career ‘unencumbered by the twin deadweights of irony and melancholy and filled with a serious and sustained (though never fully credulous) commitment to the twentieth century’s endlessly generative legacy’ (L. Wise, ‘Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty’, Artforum, May 2018). Förg was captivated by colour’s materiality and Untitled bears witness to this experimentation. The dappled canvas brims with new harmonies, a spray of tonalities that seem to arise directly from the surface of Untitled itself.