Spanning more than three metres across, Untitled (2001) is a monumental example of Günther Förg’s Gitterbilder or ‘grid paintings.’ Commenced in the early 1990s, these canvas works are dynamic, mercurial explorations of the relationship between pigment and support, offering a scintillating counterpart to Förg’s celebrated works on lead. Building on the crossbar format of his Fenster-Aquarelle (‘window-watercolours’), Förg weaves a dense lattice of dark vertical and horizontal strokes; broad patches of bright yellow, orange and chartreuse green glow through the grid like beacons in a forest. The criss-crossed surface at once invites and prohibits access, its gridlocked zones of density broken by clearings of lush, radiant hue that verge on the romantic.
As Florian Steininger has written, ‘Förg loves the ambiguous, the indecisive, the tightrope walk between roughness and finesse’ (F. Steininger, ‘Günther Förg – “The Painter’s Coat”’ in Günther Förg: Back and Forth, exh. cat. Essl Museum, Vienna, 2007, p. 15). Untitled’s patchwork of webbed darkness and luminous colour exhibits just such a balancing act. Just as the work’s gestural, even visceral brushstrokes draw attention to the process of its own creation, reminding the viewer of its physical reality as a painted canvas, the composition simultaneously conjures a pictorial, illusory sense of space. Its translucent, shifting tones expand and contract, suggesting depth but stopping short of defining it. In its sensitive treatment of mark and tone, Untitled oscillates between the imagined spaces of painting and the real, haptic presence of the artwork as object.
Förg came to prominence in a world desperately seeking new directions for painting. Among his contemporaries were artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner – the so-called ‘Hetzler boys’ – who congregated around Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne during the 1980s. Whilst many of these artists championed a wild, subversive dismantling of painterly traditions, cultivating a genre known colloquially as ‘bad painting’, Förg pursued a more rigorous, thoughtful agenda. Abandoning painting for much of the 1980s in favour of photography, he eventually returned to the medium, harnessing a variety of different supports including wood, copper and bronze as well as lead and canvas.
Grounding his approach in art history, Förg’s early influences included Georg Baselitz, Robert Ryman and Blinky Palermo: all artists who had systematically disrupted the medium’s conventions. Visually, however, his works invited greater comparison with Colour Field painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who engaged with notions of transcendence and the sublime. Unlike his predecessors, Förg was less interested in the metaphysical power of the medium than in its raw physical properties. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, he explained. ‘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’, http://www.david-ryan.co.uk/Gunther%20Forg.html). With its somatic and cerebral celebration of paint, Untitled brings this conviction to vivid life.
Post Lot Text
The work is recorded in the Günther Förg archive with the number WVF.01.B.0006.
We are most grateful to Mr. Michael Neff from the Estate of Günther Förg for the information he has kindly provided.
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