“I think painting is a resilient practice; if you look through the history of paintingit doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now.” Günther Förg
Günther Förg (1952–2013) was a central figure in postwar German art, known for a wide-ranging practice that encompassed painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Born in Füssen, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Karl Fred Dahmen, where he began his Grey Paintings, monochrome works that established his engagement with abstraction and materiality. Throughout his career, Förg drew on the legacies of Modernism—referencing figures such as Mondrian, Malevich, and Palermo—while pursuing his own investigations into surface, structure, and form.
In the 1980s he expanded into photography, producing large-format images of Bauhaus sites in Tel Aviv and other modernist landmarks. His experiments with materials included lead panels painted with acrylic, works in copper, bronze, and wood, as well as sand-cast reliefs that emphasized process and touch. Recurring motifs such as grids, windows, and spots culminated in the colorful Spot Paintings of his later years.
Förg also taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Dallas Museum of Art, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, and Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and is held in prominent collections worldwide, including Tate Britain, MoMA in New York, Kunstmuseum Basel, and Sammlung Deutsche Bank.
He lived in Switzerland and Freiburg with his wife, the artist Ika Huber, and passed away on his 61st birthday in 2013, leaving behind a diverse and influential body of work.