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Lot Essay
Measuring almost two metres in height, Untitled is a magnificent example of Günther Förg’s fascination with the alchemy of painting. Rendered in a soft, earthy palette of apricot, maroon and black, with the top of the canvas bearing a quick flash of emerald green, Förg presents us with a crescendo of cross-hatchings amassed into four linear planes, each vertical field possessing the grandeur of a New York skyscraper. The artist immerses his viewer within a densely-packed grid, enveloping us in the fabric of his brushstrokes. Complex yet considered, this formal arrangement is complemented by Förg’s nuanced use of colour: a vibrant pocket of green at the top canvas edge, gleaming like a jewel struck by sunlight. Executed in 2006, this work belongs to the series of Gitterbilder (Grid Paintings) the artist began in the mid-1990s. Combining interacting fields of depth with a vigour of line and brilliancy of colour, Untitled embodies the key conceptual principles that lay at the core of Förg’s practice—a formal purism, a sense of the artwork as object, and an architectural handling of space. As art historian Rudi Fuchs noted, ‘Förg uses the idiom of geometric abstraction with the same naturalness with which Monet used the lilies in his garden pond: material and forms that happen to be at hand, easily available as the vehicle for aesthetic sensibility, painterly style and vision’ (R. Fuchs, ‘Abstract, Dialect, Förg’, Günther Förg, exh. cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1995, p. 20).
Beginning his practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in the 1970s, Förg immersed himself in Art Informel, a school of abstraction that emphasised gestural techniques. Grounding his approach, the artist found early influences in the work of Georg Baselitz, Robert Ryman and Blinky Palermo—artists who had systematically disrupted the traditional conventions of painting. Visually, however, his works invited greater comparison with Colour Field painters such as Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who engaged with notions of transcendence and the sublime. With one eye to the past, Förg nevertheless sought a new visual language, one which embraced the raw, physical qualities of paint. By the turn of the millennium, the artist abandoned his austere colour fields in favour of a freer, more gestural style. Whilst still a core preoccupation, the agency of colour was now paired with visible traces of Förg’s hand, palpable in the painterly brushstrokes of Untitled. ‘Really,’ Förg has stated, ‘painting should be sexy. It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg,’ Karlsruhe 1997). Celebrating the chromatic brilliance of paint, whilst also bearing the marks of its own making, Untitled is a magnificent example of Förg’s refined painterly practice, rigorously interrogating the marriage of colour, material and form.
Beginning his practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in the 1970s, Förg immersed himself in Art Informel, a school of abstraction that emphasised gestural techniques. Grounding his approach, the artist found early influences in the work of Georg Baselitz, Robert Ryman and Blinky Palermo—artists who had systematically disrupted the traditional conventions of painting. Visually, however, his works invited greater comparison with Colour Field painters such as Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who engaged with notions of transcendence and the sublime. With one eye to the past, Förg nevertheless sought a new visual language, one which embraced the raw, physical qualities of paint. By the turn of the millennium, the artist abandoned his austere colour fields in favour of a freer, more gestural style. Whilst still a core preoccupation, the agency of colour was now paired with visible traces of Förg’s hand, palpable in the painterly brushstrokes of Untitled. ‘Really,’ Förg has stated, ‘painting should be sexy. It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg,’ Karlsruhe 1997). Celebrating the chromatic brilliance of paint, whilst also bearing the marks of its own making, Untitled is a magnificent example of Förg’s refined painterly practice, rigorously interrogating the marriage of colour, material and form.