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Günther Förg

Untitled

Untitled

Viewing location: Los Angeles

2006
Acrylic on wood
45 x 55 x 0.8 cm / 17 3/4 x 21 5/8 x 3/8 in
65 x 75 x 2.1 cm / 25 5/8 x 29 1/2 x 7/8 inches (overall)


An evocative example of Günther Förg’s renowned ‘Gitterbilder’ (‘Grid Paintings’), ‘Untitled’ (2006) showcases the artist’s radical engagement with the tenets of modernism. 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: a formal purism, a sense of the artwork as an object and analytical interest in architectural space. While Förg’s tendency to cleverly reimagine modernist gestures persists throughout his oeuvre, his ‘Grid Paintings’ capture his deep art historical knowledge and appreciation more completely than most of his other works. Made during an important moment in the development of the celebrated series, ‘Untitled’ consummately exemplifies Förg’s unique 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. Fuelled by his interest in and thorough study of several artists he admired, ranging from Edvard Munch to Clyfford Still, Förg began to deploy and abstract their techniques. Munch was particularly instrumental for the development of the ‘Grid Paintings.’ Inspired by the unusual crosshatching in the fore- and background of Munch’s ‘Death of Marat’ (1907), Förg’s ‘Grid Paintings’ abstract a specific element of the Norwegian artist’s work, pushing the gesture to its limits and producing a more free-flowing and unrestricted ‘grid.’ In ‘Untitled,’ the grid is rendered with a gestural fluency and improvisational hand that creates a dynamic interplay between color and the painted picture plane. The magenta bursts of color in the left half of ‘Untitled’ meanwhile illustrate how the ‘Grid Paintings’ slowly morphed into Förg’s ‘Spot Paintings,’ the artist’s last series before he was taken ill. Förg’s grids embrace spontaneity and irregularity, with overlapping and interwoven forms drawing us into his gridlocked canvas, which is at once inviting and closed off.

About the artist

Günther Förg was born in 1952 in the region of Allgäu, Germany. His career began in the early 1970s as a student at The Academy of Fine Art Munich. During his studies, Förg developed a practice grounded almost exclusively in grey and black monochrome. These early investigations into gray—also called ‘Gitter’ paintings—demonstrate the beginning of a lifelong commitment to conceptualism. As he stated, ‘Grey is nothing: not white, not black. Something in between. Not concerned with the figure. Something free.’ While the artist later incorporated color into his monochrome series, his use of gray represents a neutral foundation from which he conceived his oeuvre.

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Portrait of Günther Förg © Wilhelm Schürmann, Herzogenrath
All artwork images © Estate Günther Förg, Suisse / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Courtesy the Estate Günther Förg, Suisse