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Lot Essay
Standing more than two and a half metres in height, Untitled is a striking example of Günther Förg's mesmerising colour fields. Executed in 1989, the year after he mounted his first solo museum exhibition in America, the work sits in painterly companionship with the artist’s celebrated lead series, begun during this period, which similarly played with the friction between surface texture, colour and form. Here, inky navy and olive-brown bands vibrate against the weave of the fabric: a crepuscular world flipped on its axis.
Förg's enduring preoccupation was always colour—its presence and materiality—yet unlike many of his predecessors, he was never invested in its symbolic value. Though seemingly filled with art historical references—calling upon Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, among others—Förg ultimately sought to liberate abstraction from the lofty rhetoric and philosophical ambitions of the past. ‘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). In Untitled, Förg’s colour and surface break free from historical connotations, shifting and transforming in the changing light.
Förg's enduring preoccupation was always colour—its presence and materiality—yet unlike many of his predecessors, he was never invested in its symbolic value. Though seemingly filled with art historical references—calling upon Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, among others—Förg ultimately sought to liberate abstraction from the lofty rhetoric and philosophical ambitions of the past. ‘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). In Untitled, Förg’s colour and surface break free from historical connotations, shifting and transforming in the changing light.