Günther Förg
Untitled
‘In the grid paintings you often don’t get a brush stroke, the surface is scratched into or you don’t get a sense of the mark starting or finishing on the canvas so it sets up a different kind of surface. I think it is important to do these breaks when the time is right.’—Günther Förg [1]
Made in 2006, ‘Untitled’ is a strikingly scaled example of Günther Förg’s renowned Gitterbilder (Grid Paintings). The motifs in the iconic series constitute an indispensable component of Förg’s trademark vocabulary. They reflect many of the underpinning conceptual principles of the artist’s practice: formal purism, a sense of the artwork as an object and an analytical interest in architectural space. A testament to Förg’s fundamental understanding of the relationship between color, composition and gesture, ‘Untitled’ exemplifies the artist’s distinct approach to abstraction.
After pursuing a purely photographic practice for several years during the early 1980s, Förg entered a new phase of experimentation later in the decade, which brought him back to painting. Fueled by a thorough study of several artists he admired, including Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly, Förg began to deploy and abstract their techniques. Yet it was the work of Edvard Munch, specifically the unusual crosshatching in the foreground and background of his renowned ‘Death of Marat II’ (1907), which was particularly instrumental to the development of the Grid Paintings.
Munch’s ‘Death of Marat II’ inspired both the palette and irregular grid of ‘Untitled.’ Along the lower edge of ‘Untitled,’ bright orange brushstrokes are juxtaposed with stark black, irregular lines that grow upward across areas of gray and shades of green, challenging perceptions of illusionistic depth and figure-ground relationships. Rather than copying another artist’s gesture, Förg explores a specific element of Munch’s work, abstracting it and pushing it to its limits.
The grid would eventually become the hallmark of Förg’s visual lexicon and the starting point for almost all subsequent paintings he made until 2009. While Förg’s tendency to cleverly reimage modernist gestures persists throughout his oeuvre, his Grid Paintings capture his deep art historical knowledge and appreciation more completely than many of his other works. Testing the possibilities and boundaries of painting, ‘Untitled’ showcases Förg’s radical engagement with the tenets of modernism.
About the artist
Günther Förg is one of the most significant German artists of the postwar generation. Known for the breadth of his production, Förg’s work spans monochrome painting, color studies, photography, wall paintings, bronze reliefs and sculptures. Förg explored what art critic Kirsty Bell describes as ‘the visual field,’ swiftly moving between mediums and series with an abruptness that so characteristically defined the artist and his work. Like many of his contemporaries, including his friends Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool, Förg devoted his practice to wrestling with the feeling of disenchantment with painting and the binding ties to modernism.