Untitled

This work by Günther Förg is a monumental and magnificent example of the artist’s acrylic painting, exploring abstract matter in its purist language. Bordered by three polychromatic strips, a gaping void of grey brushstrokes lulls the viewer into a deep appreciation of painterly simplicity and formal negation. Recalling the artist’s acclaimed lead works, the watercolour-like washes of silver, with their deliberately translucent lucidities, tantalisingly reveal the ground behind, whilst stimulating the contemplator’s perception with their swathed pockets of illusory pictorial space. The horizontal and vertical borders support this luminous window of silver, and recall the striped leitmotifs of Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko in their chromatic and formal configuration. However, unlike these two emotionally-engaged abstractors, Förg executes his work without a spiritualist, metaphysical or existentialist imperative, but rather favours an abstract purism which glorifies the objecthood of the painting itself. Employing thick, broad brushstrokes, which tease out the ground beneath, Förg deconstructs the mystification of the painting’s conception and creation, exposing the very process of painting and legitimising its concreteness as a physical object.

Förg’s greatest concern with painting has consistently been a negation of thematic content and implicit meaning; notably, he once stated that ‘abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg, Paintings on Lead, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2006, p. 6). The present work emblematises the artist’s intentions to challenge, confound and contribute to modernist discourses on basic abstract assumptions; as he once declared, ‘I think if we take a broader perspective we could say that, fundamentally as soon as we engage with painting, we have the same problems that faced those at the beginning of the century or even before; problems around color, form, composition’ (G. Förg, interview with D. Ryan, Talking Painting, Karlsruhe 1997, reproduced at https://www.david-ryan.co.uk/gunther0forg. html). By reducing abstraction to this tripartite structure, Förg has succeeded in relinquishing an emotional or transcendental hold on modernist visual language, in favour of shedding a pure and objective formalism that speaks to the beholder’s greatest aesthetic sensibilities.