Artist: Günther Förg

In 1985, Günther Förg (1952–2013) photographs the former home of silk manufacturer Hermann Lange (1874–1942) at Wilhelmshof Ave 91 in Krefeld. Built between 1928 and 1930, the Lange house is one of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s (1886–1969) earliest modernist designs, in which, while simultaneously working on his pavilion for the 1929 World’s Fair in Barcelona, he puts to the test his vision of Neues Bauen (New Building) in a private context.

Why does Förg go to Krefeld? Why does he photograph the Lange house? In the late 1970s, he gives up traditional panel painting for several years. The given architectural situation becomes his central point of reference. In the resulting wall paintings, he focusses the aesthetic experience on the immediate relation between space, place and body. Starting in 1981, he includes photography. Förg photographs modernist and rationalist buildings from the 1920s through the 1940s, such as the iconic Villa Malaparte on Capri and the palazzi of the Esposizione Universale di Roma, originally planned for 1942. The images of Mies van der Rohe’s Lange house belong to this seminal series of early architectural photographs.

Förg took four monumental color photographs of the Lange house, which he exhibited in 1986 as part of his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern. Forty years later, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin will exhibit these four photos again for the first time on the occasion of the new Frankfurt gallery season. A show nothing short of a small sensation.

Text: Christian Malycha