Artist: Günther Förg

Retrospective on two floors

Günther Förg’s painting is a devotion to colour, a relentless attempt to explore its autonomy and and seemingly infinite richness of variation through ever new combinations of colours and materials. With apparent ease, Förg brings together the incompatible, combining elements of concrete art with gestural components, rigour with spontaneity, a calculated system with the spontaneous intuition of colour application. Whether in his grid paintings, lead paintings, colour fields or his rare, large-format paintings on copper, created between 1987 and 1990: Förg’s painting must succeed in one stroke; it must be realised on the picture carrier in one go. Again and again, Förg’s painting seeks stylistic dialogue with other artists. In addition to influences from pre-war abstract modernism, constructivism and suprematism, american action- and colourfield painting play a decisive role.

However, for his rare paintings on copper, Lucio Fontana’s avant-garde painting serves as the central source of inspiration. In 1949, Fontana declared the hole, the radical gesture of piercing the canvas, to be his artistic signature. With his ‘Bucchi’ (holes) and the legendary ‘Tagli’ (cuts) that evolved from them—works grouped under the title “Concetto Spaziale”—Fontana took a bold and art historically significant step. These works are now considered icons of postwar modernism not only due to their extraordinary artistic progressiveness but also their captivatingly reduced aesthetic. This restrained artistic signature, which contrasts with the gestural painting of European Informel and American Action Painting and which Fontana executes on large copper plates in his series ‘Concetto Spaziale, New York’, provided the decisive impulse for the young Förg in 1987 to create a magnificent series of works on copper. Within just three years, Förg created large-scale paintings on the reddish-metallic surface, onto which he applied gleaming concave verticals - an homage to Fontana’s cuts.

The copper work (Fö 389) is not only one of the earliest paintings in this small series, created in 1987, but also one of the most aesthetically sophisticated. The reduced yet vivid white tone, shimmering with a soft green hue, applied in a gestural manner, forms a striking contrast to the reddish color and the smooth, glossy surface of the copper. This captivating aesthetic is the result of Förg’s unique artistic approach, his masterful play with art-historical tradition, which he confidently adapts and transforms, repeatedly provides new and vital impulses for his multifaceted oeuvre. Förg’s paintings can be found in numerous international museum collections.