Günther Förg was born in Füssen, southwest of Munich, near the Austrian border in 1952. One of the most significant German artists of the postwar generation, Günther Förg’s pioneering cross-disciplinary practice questioned artistic conventions.In his extensive series of works he attempted to decipher histories, misreadings, and the conflicted relationships surrounding the legacy of Modernism’s aesthetics, often returning to themes that preoccupied him throughout the entirety of his career.
From 1973 to 1979 he was a student of Karl Fred Dahmen at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Dahmen, who was one of the most important figures of the Art Informel, had no major influence on Förg’s development, but rather allowed his students to work freely – according to the artist’s own words. During his time at the Academy, Förg first started with his Grey Paintings in 1973 and continued the series until his death in 2013. Dense, elegant works, the paintings evidence the artist’s ever evolving relationship with the monochrome and investigations of materiality. Grounding his practice and laying the foundation for the artist’s entire oevure, these works demonstrate the beginnings of Förg’s lifelong commitment to a conceptual approach to art-making. They call to mind both Joseph Beuys’s Blackboards and Cy Twombly’s chalkboard paintings from 1967 – 1971, which Förg had visited during an exhibition of Twombly’s work at the Lenbachhaus in Munich during the summer of 1973. The experience, he recalls, was revelatory and motivated Förg to produce one new painting each week over a period of three years. Another early influence can be seen in the works of Blinky Palermo, the precocious German abstractionist who was known for his so-called fabric paintings, made from coloured cloths stretched over a frame.
As Rudi Fuchs, art historian and one time director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam explains, to Günther Förg, abstraction came as a “natural language”. Artists who came before him, like Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevitch, but also Barnett Newman and Donald Judd, laid the groundwork for the acceptance of abstraction as high form of expression.
In the 1980s, he began experimenting with photography and large-format images of culturally and politically significant architectural structures, from Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv to Fascist constructions in Italy. Between 1988 and 1998, in a project titled Barcelona Pavillion, Förg photographed Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion that had been built for the International Exposition of 1929 and was reconstructed in 1986. Architecture in particular influenced and inspired Förg’s entire oeuvre. The late 1980s brought him back to painting, but also included the embrace of new materials for him, such as wood, copper, bronze and lead. Förg’s renowned lead series – acrylic painted on sheets of lead wrapped over wood – blurs the line between painting and sculpture in an evolution towards object-making.
Förg obsessively engaged with the pictorial practice of his predecessors, liberally borrowing techniques and tropes of modernist painting with an uninhibited and candid approach to imitation, appropriation, and influence. He possessed a deep and vast knowledge of art and art history. Well read, he maintained an extensive arts library throughout his career,
complete with over three thousand titles. Like his contemporaries, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Förg posessed a keen self-awareness and his work exhibits an attitude that sought “the freedom to synthesise things.” Testing the possibilities and limitations of the disciplines he engaged, his practice expanded the narratives of painting proposed by painters who grasped the potential of color and form.
From Barnett Newman, Blinky Palermo, and Cy Twombly, to Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Paul Klee, and Edvard Munch, among others, Förg’s physical and sensuous approach to material derived gestures and principles from the aesthetics of Modernism, adding them to the tools and means of his art-making as a conceptually significant aspect of his practice.
Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure, constitute a common thread in his work.
Starting around 1992, Förg stated working on his Gitterbilder on paper and canvas. His architectural photographs can be taken as proof for his interest in linear structures and might have inspired his famous Grid Paintings. Their beginnings can be seen in an earlier series of so-called Fenster-Aquarelle, in which the window cross forms a spatial grid in the picture plane, providing the framework for a reccuring theme in Förg’s body of work. The geometric linework, the grid shapes, evoke elements of architecture, but also of nature and landscapes. As art historian Florian Steininger wrote, the Grid Paintings contend with the dichotomous nature of painting, in which material flatness and illusionistic depth converse and collide.
Between 2003 and 2007, Förg produced an expansive series of small works on wood, transforming paintings that he had created on a large-scale to miniature compositions of formal reprise. In these works, Förg imitated himself and revisited previous large scale work, and in doing so, imitated his appropriation of the modern masters. The breadth of these works span the artist’s career and explore different periods of his practice, from his Lead-, Window- and Color-Field Paintings to his Grid- and Spot Paintings.
In his later years, Günther Förg surprised with brighter and more gestural paintings, resulting from an intuitive approach to colour and composition, renewing again his artistic practice. His intensely colourful Spot Paintings were partially inspired by photographs Förg saw of Francis Bacon’s studio, which was covered in colorful blotches of paint created when the artist would wipe his brushes on the walls and door of the studio to remove excess paint. This method was all too familiar to Förg, who would frequently work out the value of a color by dabbing pigment from his brush to a paper or cloth surface. In this way, Förg’s Spot paintings be seen as an irreverent reversal of artistic tradition.
Förg’s sculptural work demonstrates his free translation of creative and formal principles, from one medium to another and highlights the tactile and ephemeral qualities within his complex, personal vocabulary that operated outside of expected hierarchies. As Förg said, “The sculptures were already there and I tried to transfer them into painting with strong colours. It’s a procedure, incidentally, that is typical of my work. I’m always moving between disciplines.” Upturning and challenging classical bronze, his sculptures do not reflect on an aesthetic order or classical perfection but display his delight in the act of making and in the sensual presence of the work. This is evident in the depressions, scratches and imprints strewn over the surfaces of his sculptures, which vary from intimate to monumental and from reliefs to free-standing sculptures. Förg’s sand-cast bronze reliefs show traces left in thin plaster by the artist’s hands or his palette knife, making the gesture, the act of making visible.
Günther Förg was a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich from 1999 until his death in 2013, he tought at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe from 1992 to 1999. Förg’s private life was never much in the foreground and little is known, apart from his marriage to artist Ika Huber. He resided in Areuse, Switzerland and in Freiburg, Germany, where he died on his 61st birthday after prolonged illness.
Günther Förg’s œvre was the subject of a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018) and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2019), other solo exhibitions include Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2015); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2014); Sammlung Grässlin, Sankt Georgen (2012); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2009); Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2008); Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen (2006); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2006); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2001); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995); and Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach (1989). His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including documenta IX, Kassel (1992) and “von hier aus – Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf” (1984). His work is part of numerous major collections, among them the Sammlung Deutsche Bank with more than 900 artworks, Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum of Modern Art New York City, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many other museums and private collections.