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拍品专文
Held in the same private collection for more than twenty years, Untitled (2003) is a vibrant example of Günther Förg’s series of Gitterbilder (‘Grid Paintings’). The artist began making these paintings in 1992, departing from the relative austerity of his earlier works on lead. On a great scale, the present canvas consists of a dynamic patchwork of latticed markings in green, deep red, ochre, cream and black. Combining interacting depths of field with vigorous line and brilliant colour, it embodies what Förg deemed to be the most fascinating aspect of painting: ‘the intermingling of the expressive and the rational’ (quoted in D. Dietrich, ‘An Interview with Günther Förg’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, August 1989, p. 84).
Förg rose to prominence in 1980s Germany. During the heyday of Neo-Expressionist figuration, he instead took an experimental and critical approach towards abstraction. Focusing on colour, material and space, he created a diverse body of work that encompassed painting, drawing, murals, sculpture and photography. He looked to twentieth-century modernism as his toolbox, using tropes such as the monochrome, the grid and the colour-field in a way that broke them down to their physical components and left behind any transcendent ideals. As Rudi Fuchs writes, ‘Förg uses the idiom of geometric abstraction with the same naturalness with which Monet used the lilies in his garden pond: material and forms that happen to be at hand, easily available as the vehicle for aesthetic sensibility, painterly style and vision’ (‘Abstract, Dialect, Förg’, Günther Förg, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1995, p. 20). Like many of his works, the Gitterbilder also contain echoes of architectural form, a fascination with which permeated every aspect of Förg’s oeuvre.
Where his works on lead had engaged with the sublime chromatics of Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Förg made some of his first Gitterbilder in direct response to the work of Edvard Munch. His interest in the artist had been reignited after meeting the Norwegian Munch specialist Per Bjarne Boym in the early 1990s. He was captivated less by Munch’s figures than by his use of vivid colour and hatched line to create intense, emotionally charged settings. Förg’s Gitterbilder are similarly infused with feeling, subverting the rigid qualities of the modernist grid. Later examples such as the present became increasingly freeform, instinctive and playful, with irregular patches and bursts of colour creating dynamic and vital surfaces. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, Förg said. ‘It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg,’ Karlsruhe, 1997).
Förg rose to prominence in 1980s Germany. During the heyday of Neo-Expressionist figuration, he instead took an experimental and critical approach towards abstraction. Focusing on colour, material and space, he created a diverse body of work that encompassed painting, drawing, murals, sculpture and photography. He looked to twentieth-century modernism as his toolbox, using tropes such as the monochrome, the grid and the colour-field in a way that broke them down to their physical components and left behind any transcendent ideals. As Rudi Fuchs writes, ‘Förg uses the idiom of geometric abstraction with the same naturalness with which Monet used the lilies in his garden pond: material and forms that happen to be at hand, easily available as the vehicle for aesthetic sensibility, painterly style and vision’ (‘Abstract, Dialect, Förg’, Günther Förg, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1995, p. 20). Like many of his works, the Gitterbilder also contain echoes of architectural form, a fascination with which permeated every aspect of Förg’s oeuvre.
Where his works on lead had engaged with the sublime chromatics of Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Förg made some of his first Gitterbilder in direct response to the work of Edvard Munch. His interest in the artist had been reignited after meeting the Norwegian Munch specialist Per Bjarne Boym in the early 1990s. He was captivated less by Munch’s figures than by his use of vivid colour and hatched line to create intense, emotionally charged settings. Förg’s Gitterbilder are similarly infused with feeling, subverting the rigid qualities of the modernist grid. Later examples such as the present became increasingly freeform, instinctive and playful, with irregular patches and bursts of colour creating dynamic and vital surfaces. ‘Really, painting should be sexy’, Förg said. ‘It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg,’ Karlsruhe, 1997).