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Lot Essay
Painted in 2005, Günther Förg’s Untitled unfurls a magnificent patchwork of line, colour and form. Spanning a height of a metre and a half, the large-scale canvas comes from a crucial period of the artist’s pictorial development. Bearing the distinctive, gestural markings of both the Gitterbilder ‘Grid Paintings’ and Tupfenbilder ‘Spot Paintings’, the present painting seems to occupy the precise juncture between two of the artist’s most iconic and widely celebrated series. Beneath a lattice of emphatic vertical and horizontal lines, one can glimpse the artist’s unmistakable spots of vibrant orange, yellow and cadmium red. The daubs electrify the canvas from within, and, across its expansive surface, Förg masterfully balances tightly hatched structures with a chromatic intensity characteristic of his later oeuvre. Indeed, the work embodies what the artist deems to be the most fascinating aspect of painting: ‘the intermingling of the expressive and the rational’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Dietrich, ‘An Interview with Günther Förg’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, August 1989, p. 84).
The lattice structure can be traced back through Förg’s career to his early series of Fenster-Aquarelle ‘Window Watercolours’. Reimagining the art-historical motif of the window—first popularised as a metaphor for the illusionary and flat pictorial plane by Renaissance Humanist Leon Battista Alberti—the gridded form offered the artist a portal through which to explore and formalise an abstract reality. Where his artistic predecessors had turned to abstraction to access a transcendent, metaphysical realm, Förg’s interests remained in the world around him: ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, he said, ‘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, Newport Beach 1989, p. 6). A close reader of art history, Förg was strongly influenced by Modernism, its proclivity for hard-edged geometry and purist, rectilinear structures. Among the ‘Grid Paintings’, begun in the early 1990s, one can trace rich aesthetic legacies of the twentieth century. Tight, criss-crossing networks of line evoke at once the glass, steel-framed facades of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus—Förg’s series of black-and-white photographs of the Dessau school, executed in the same decade, is one of his most widely acclaimed—and Piet Mondrian’s early De Stijl compositions, for example.
Marking the artist’s return to the grid almost a decade after its inception, the present painting distinguishes the sensuous, invigorated evolution of Förg’s late practice. In loose and energised gestures, line is unleashed in autographic, scarcely legible scribbles—evoking the passionate expressions of abstract titans Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, the artist has claimed. ‘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). Here, brushwork is Förg’s primary subject matter. Accentuated against a signature ground of white primer, scores of vivid colour assemble like words on a page, inflected with an almost staccato rhythm. His graphic spots were part inspired by photographs he had seen of Francis Bacon’s studio, where residual marks left by the artist wiping excess paint from his brushes adorned the walls with patterns of colourful blotches. Indeed, evoking centuries-old traditional painting methods, Förg’s compositions are scattered with similar chromatic ‘workings-out’, where pigments are combined and tested, their colour values determined. Drawing our attention to the pictorial surface with a palimpsest of gesture and colour, Förg’s painting nods to the process of its own creation.
The lattice structure can be traced back through Förg’s career to his early series of Fenster-Aquarelle ‘Window Watercolours’. Reimagining the art-historical motif of the window—first popularised as a metaphor for the illusionary and flat pictorial plane by Renaissance Humanist Leon Battista Alberti—the gridded form offered the artist a portal through which to explore and formalise an abstract reality. Where his artistic predecessors had turned to abstraction to access a transcendent, metaphysical realm, Förg’s interests remained in the world around him: ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, he said, ‘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, Newport Beach 1989, p. 6). A close reader of art history, Förg was strongly influenced by Modernism, its proclivity for hard-edged geometry and purist, rectilinear structures. Among the ‘Grid Paintings’, begun in the early 1990s, one can trace rich aesthetic legacies of the twentieth century. Tight, criss-crossing networks of line evoke at once the glass, steel-framed facades of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus—Förg’s series of black-and-white photographs of the Dessau school, executed in the same decade, is one of his most widely acclaimed—and Piet Mondrian’s early De Stijl compositions, for example.
Marking the artist’s return to the grid almost a decade after its inception, the present painting distinguishes the sensuous, invigorated evolution of Förg’s late practice. In loose and energised gestures, line is unleashed in autographic, scarcely legible scribbles—evoking the passionate expressions of abstract titans Cy Twombly and Jackson Pollock. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, the artist has claimed. ‘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). Here, brushwork is Förg’s primary subject matter. Accentuated against a signature ground of white primer, scores of vivid colour assemble like words on a page, inflected with an almost staccato rhythm. His graphic spots were part inspired by photographs he had seen of Francis Bacon’s studio, where residual marks left by the artist wiping excess paint from his brushes adorned the walls with patterns of colourful blotches. Indeed, evoking centuries-old traditional painting methods, Förg’s compositions are scattered with similar chromatic ‘workings-out’, where pigments are combined and tested, their colour values determined. Drawing our attention to the pictorial surface with a palimpsest of gesture and colour, Förg’s painting nods to the process of its own creation.