In Günther Förg’s 2005 painting Untitled, the vibrant canvas is enlivened with a criss-crossing mesh of lines, interspersed with radiant pockets of colour. A superb example of Förg’s Gitterbilder, or ‘grid paintings’, the abstract composition perfectly encapsulates the artist’s ability to build and explore spaces on the canvas. The viewer is drawn into a gridlocked world which at once seems to invite and prohibit access: the saturated surface is covered with a lattice of horizontal and vertical lines rendered in dynamic brushstrokes which transition intermittently from powerful to flighty, solid to swift. Composed predominantly in black paint, they overlap atop one another creating multi-layered tones of charcoal and grey as the paint thins out from the brush, evoking an unexpected sense of depth. At moments, the monochrome palette becomes resplendently colourful, with gridded swathes of chartreuse green and orchid pink. At the top left of the picture plane a bold configuration of sky-blue emanates from the surface in vertical streaks. ‘Förg loves the ambiguous, the indecisive, the tightrope walk between roughness and finesse,’ writes Florian Steininger, and indeed, playing with the dynamics of the visible and the invisible, the concealed and the revealed, the artist has partially obliterated sections of the blue behind the interweaving net of black lines (F. Steininger, ‘Günther Förg – “The Painter’s Coat” in Günther Förg: Back and Forth, exh. cat., Essl Museum, Wien 2007, p. 15).

Expertly measuring the presence of line against its absence, the traversing bars of Untitled generate an intriguing patchwork of window and net forms which seem to expand and contract the space contained behind them. Building these interacting fields of depth while achieving such a vigorousness of line and brilliancy of colour, Förg’s work reflects the conceptual principles that underpin his practice: a formal purism, a sense of the artwork as object, and an architectural interest in space, both real and illusory. Indeed, just as the work’s gestural, even visceral brushstrokes, draw attention to the process of its own painting, reminding the viewer of its physical reality as a worked object, the gridded composition simultaneously conjures a pictorial, illusory sense of space, where the painting’s translucent, shifting tones suggest depth but fail to completely define it. In its sensitive treatment of forms and marks, Untitled enthrallingly transports us between the imagined spaces of painting, and the real, corporeal presence of an artwork as it exists in the flesh.
Post Lot Text
The work is recorded in the Günther Förg archive under the number WVF.05.B.0022.
We are most grateful to Mr. Michael Neff from the Estate of Günther Förg for the information he has kindly provided.