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Lot Essay
Visually striking and conceptually daring, Colour Field is a rare and important early work by Günther Förg. Painted in 1986, and acquired by the present owner two years later, it is one of only three works of its kind to feature gold leaf: here, the medium takes its place alongside four panels of rich matte colour applied to a wood ground. Together, the five panes propose a harmonious equilibrium, hovering elusively upon the grain of their support. The work forms part of the artist’s early Colour Field series: vast, near-architectural apparitions that extend the language of his wall paintings of the late 1970s. Experimenting with the relationship between colour, form and surface, Förg plays with a variety of historical references, from geometric abstraction to American colour field painting. By painting on base sculptural materials, however—he would employ lead and copper as well as wood—he sought to overturn the lofty philosophical rhetoric that had previously surrounded abstraction. Instead, works such as the present revel in the primal physicality of their sensual surfaces, delighting in the alchemical interaction between paint and support.
With its strict architectural divisions, Colour Field is formally reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, Ellsworth Kelly’s hard-edge geometries and Gerhard Richter’s Colour Charts: all works that sought to redefine the relationship between colour and form. By consciously appropriating these precedents, Förg sought to strip away the spiritual ideology and ambition that had underpinned much of the previous generation’s work. Operating in the post-modern era, he believed that abstraction no longer needed to be defended or theorised but instead was simply one mode of image-making among many others. ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, he explained. ‘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. Newport Harbour Art Museum, Newport Beach 1989, p. 6). Boldly renouncing the medium’s long-standing metaphysical claims, the present work refocuses our attention on the rich materiality of the painted surface, where wood, pigment and gold leaf conspire on their own terms.
With its strict architectural divisions, Colour Field is formally reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s ‘zips’, Ellsworth Kelly’s hard-edge geometries and Gerhard Richter’s Colour Charts: all works that sought to redefine the relationship between colour and form. By consciously appropriating these precedents, Förg sought to strip away the spiritual ideology and ambition that had underpinned much of the previous generation’s work. Operating in the post-modern era, he believed that abstraction no longer needed to be defended or theorised but instead was simply one mode of image-making among many others. ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, he explained. ‘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. Newport Harbour Art Museum, Newport Beach 1989, p. 6). Boldly renouncing the medium’s long-standing metaphysical claims, the present work refocuses our attention on the rich materiality of the painted surface, where wood, pigment and gold leaf conspire on their own terms.