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Lot Essay
Brimming with colour and vivacity, Untitled is a lyrical example of Günther Förg’s celebrated Gitterbilder or Grid Paintings. Painted in 1999 following his solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the work conjures the verticality and vitality of the urban landscape. Like light dancing across a skyscraper, blush pink cascades over the black grids of the painting while a strip of blue stretches elegantly skywards. Although Förg began the Grid Paintings in the early 1990s, he first used the lattice motif in his earlier series Fenster-Aquarelle (Window Watercolours). Whilst Förg understood each series to be finite, he regularly reincarnated motifs across his practice. For these earlier works, he painted delicate lines atop washes of colour, suggesting a depth belying the confines of the canvas, and Untitled too reflects Förg’s ability to construct space within the flat picture plane.
Born in Germany, Förg studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich where he was immersed in Art Informel, a gestural form of abstraction. He enthusiastically engaged with art history, playing with—and borrowing from—his Modernist predecessors. Describing his relationship to the medium’s past, Förg said, ‘[People] have accused me of having returned to traditional painting. But painting is really important. There are, of course, times when one negates that, but today I see my work as more aligned with the classical tradition in art’ (G. Förg, interviewed by D. Dietrich in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, Vol. XX No. 3, July-August 1989). Indeed, the Gitterbilder are part of an extensive dialogue with Edvard Munch’s expressionist compositions: In the early 1990s, Förg met Per Bjarne Boym, the art historian and Munch specialist, and his own fascination with the Norwegian painter grew quickly thereafter: indeed, some of the earliest Gitterbilder were created in direct response to specific works by Munch. He became captivated by the elaborate, pulsating backgrounds that fill Munch’s paintings and do more than operate simply as scenery. Förg’s interest was, perhaps, more theoretical than aesthetic, and his grids too suggest an alternative and painterly understanding of pictorial space in which the substantive and the immaterial merge.
Likewise, Förg’s lattices are more than flat abstraction: they animate the pictorial space. As Catherine Quéloz writes, ‘The work of Günther Förg projects the spectator into a multidimensional space’ (C. Quéloz, ‘At the Crossroads of Disciplines: An Economy of Regard’, Parkett 26, 1990, p. 56). Such energised imagery seems to evoke the ‘zips’ of Barnett Newman, and Förg too delighted in the rhythmic movement of his colours. Unlike his Modernist forebears, however, his works were conceived in opposition to the spiritual claims of the American Abstract Expressionists. ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, the artist explained. ‘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, California 1989, p. 6). Instead, Förg saw abstraction as simply another mode of picture-making and a means to probe a new dimensional plane. Enveloping its viewer into a tapestry of lines, Untitled summons a staggering sense of place.
Born in Germany, Förg studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich where he was immersed in Art Informel, a gestural form of abstraction. He enthusiastically engaged with art history, playing with—and borrowing from—his Modernist predecessors. Describing his relationship to the medium’s past, Förg said, ‘[People] have accused me of having returned to traditional painting. But painting is really important. There are, of course, times when one negates that, but today I see my work as more aligned with the classical tradition in art’ (G. Förg, interviewed by D. Dietrich in The Print Collector’s Newsletter, Vol. XX No. 3, July-August 1989). Indeed, the Gitterbilder are part of an extensive dialogue with Edvard Munch’s expressionist compositions: In the early 1990s, Förg met Per Bjarne Boym, the art historian and Munch specialist, and his own fascination with the Norwegian painter grew quickly thereafter: indeed, some of the earliest Gitterbilder were created in direct response to specific works by Munch. He became captivated by the elaborate, pulsating backgrounds that fill Munch’s paintings and do more than operate simply as scenery. Förg’s interest was, perhaps, more theoretical than aesthetic, and his grids too suggest an alternative and painterly understanding of pictorial space in which the substantive and the immaterial merge.
Likewise, Förg’s lattices are more than flat abstraction: they animate the pictorial space. As Catherine Quéloz writes, ‘The work of Günther Förg projects the spectator into a multidimensional space’ (C. Quéloz, ‘At the Crossroads of Disciplines: An Economy of Regard’, Parkett 26, 1990, p. 56). Such energised imagery seems to evoke the ‘zips’ of Barnett Newman, and Förg too delighted in the rhythmic movement of his colours. Unlike his Modernist forebears, however, his works were conceived in opposition to the spiritual claims of the American Abstract Expressionists. ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, the artist explained. ‘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, California 1989, p. 6). Instead, Förg saw abstraction as simply another mode of picture-making and a means to probe a new dimensional plane. Enveloping its viewer into a tapestry of lines, Untitled summons a staggering sense of place.