.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Standing nearly two and a half metres in height, the present work is a monumental early example of Günther Förg’s celebrated lead paintings. Executed in 1988 – the year of his American debut – it marks his triumphant return to painting after spending much of the decade immersed in photography and sculpture. Divided into three horizontal red and blue bands, its geometric rigour is held in tension with its shimmering, volatile surface, fuelled by the unstable interaction between paint and metal. Coming to prominence alongside artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, Förg cultivated a rich multi-media practice that offered new hope for abstraction. Riffing upon the languages of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, he infused his vast planes of colour with a new material sensuality, dispensing with ideology and instead rejoicing in the pure physical pleasure of painting. Förg’s lead works came to represent the most important expressions of this approach: in Untitled, paint hovers elusively upon its dense, heavy support, shifting and mutating with the changing light.
Förg came of age at the dawn of the post-modern era, in a world that had grown weary of painting. Unlike Kippenberger and Oehlen, however – both of whom sought to revive the medium through wild brushwork and subversive subject matter – Förg pursued a more measured agenda. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1979, he began a series of abstract paintings made directly upon the wall, liberating himself from the historic constraints of the canvas. In his subsequent forays into sculpture and photography, he continued to wrestle with material convention, deliberately blurring the boundaries between media in a bid to unhinge them from tradition. The lead paintings, in many ways, marked the culmination of these early investigations: hovering between two and three dimensions, they were less paintings than raw, physical objects, whose surfaces were at once familiar and alien. ‘I like very much the qualities of lead’, said Förg ‘– the surface, the heaviness … 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).
By embracing a base industrial material in this way, Förg sought to rid abstraction of its Modernist baggage. Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly had posited their artworks as pure, self-referential creations; Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, meanwhile, declared that their canvases had the power to transport viewers beyond the material realm. By explicitly playing with the languages of these predecessors, Förg ultimately strove to undermine them. Free from lofty metaphysical aspiration, works such as the present revel in their visceral, tactile qualities, delighting in the unpredictable patterns and textures that muddle their geometric bands. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, claimed Förg. ‘It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (G. Förg, quoted ibid.). Here, colour, form and surface break free from the dogmas of the past, liberated in glowing, alchemical splendour.
Förg came of age at the dawn of the post-modern era, in a world that had grown weary of painting. Unlike Kippenberger and Oehlen, however – both of whom sought to revive the medium through wild brushwork and subversive subject matter – Förg pursued a more measured agenda. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1979, he began a series of abstract paintings made directly upon the wall, liberating himself from the historic constraints of the canvas. In his subsequent forays into sculpture and photography, he continued to wrestle with material convention, deliberately blurring the boundaries between media in a bid to unhinge them from tradition. The lead paintings, in many ways, marked the culmination of these early investigations: hovering between two and three dimensions, they were less paintings than raw, physical objects, whose surfaces were at once familiar and alien. ‘I like very much the qualities of lead’, said Förg ‘– the surface, the heaviness … 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).
By embracing a base industrial material in this way, Förg sought to rid abstraction of its Modernist baggage. Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly had posited their artworks as pure, self-referential creations; Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, meanwhile, declared that their canvases had the power to transport viewers beyond the material realm. By explicitly playing with the languages of these predecessors, Förg ultimately strove to undermine them. Free from lofty metaphysical aspiration, works such as the present revel in their visceral, tactile qualities, delighting in the unpredictable patterns and textures that muddle their geometric bands. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, claimed Förg. ‘It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (G. Förg, quoted ibid.). Here, colour, form and surface break free from the dogmas of the past, liberated in glowing, alchemical splendour.