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Lot Essay
Offering a vision of chromatic primacy, Günther Förg’s Untitled is an arresting example from the artist’s series of ‘spot paintings’ created between 2007 and 2009. Among Förg’s final canvases, this series is a stunning culmination of a career spent dedicated to colour and form. For Förg, painting was a site of experimentation in which the colours themselves shaped the composition. In Untitled, earthy reds, olive, and browns flicker against the pale cream ground as apples of rose illumine the terrestrial tableau. ‘One cannot even begin to appraise the effect of floating, dancing colours’, said art historian Rudi Fuchs. ‘Their sparkling behaviour, elusive as light on splashing water, is a main source for the elusive energy in these paintings’ (R. Fuchs, Günther Förg: Back and Forth, Cologne 2008, pp. 9-10).
Since his days studying at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich, the materiality of painting has been a central focus for Förg, and his painterly investigations led him to explore the very physicality of colour. Unlike his contemporaries Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, however—both of whom sought to revive the medium through expressive brushwork and subversive subject matter—Förg took a more measured approach. Subsequent pursuits into photography and sculpture enabled him to continue his interrogation of material conditions, but no matter the medium, he remained firmly rooted in the real. With a keen eye to the past, Förg engaged with his Modernist predecessors: from Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, his ‘physical and sensuous approach to material culls gestures and principles from the aesthetics of modernism’ yet all the while, he charted a more conceptual course, appropriating their pictorial strategies and making them anew (‘The Visual Field of Günther Förg’, Ursula, 18 January 2019).
While Förg remained a lifelong proponent of abstraction, by the turn of the twenty-first century he had embraced a looser, more subjective approach. If the colours still determined the composition, traces of Förg’s hand were now visible as well. For the artist, such evolving experiments affirmed the present moment. ‘I think painting is a resilient practice,’ he said. ‘If you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg’, Karlsruhe 1997). Indeed, works such as Untitled blaze with immediacy, both absorbing the world in which Förg existed and reflecting the sensations he sought to image.
Since his days studying at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich, the materiality of painting has been a central focus for Förg, and his painterly investigations led him to explore the very physicality of colour. Unlike his contemporaries Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, however—both of whom sought to revive the medium through expressive brushwork and subversive subject matter—Förg took a more measured approach. Subsequent pursuits into photography and sculpture enabled him to continue his interrogation of material conditions, but no matter the medium, he remained firmly rooted in the real. With a keen eye to the past, Förg engaged with his Modernist predecessors: from Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, his ‘physical and sensuous approach to material culls gestures and principles from the aesthetics of modernism’ yet all the while, he charted a more conceptual course, appropriating their pictorial strategies and making them anew (‘The Visual Field of Günther Förg’, Ursula, 18 January 2019).
While Förg remained a lifelong proponent of abstraction, by the turn of the twenty-first century he had embraced a looser, more subjective approach. If the colours still determined the composition, traces of Förg’s hand were now visible as well. For the artist, such evolving experiments affirmed the present moment. ‘I think painting is a resilient practice,’ he said. ‘If you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg’, Karlsruhe 1997). Indeed, works such as Untitled blaze with immediacy, both absorbing the world in which Förg existed and reflecting the sensations he sought to image.