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Lot Essay
Like a jewellery box whose contents have spilled out and caught the light, Günther Förg’s Untitled offers a sparkling spectrum of colour. Across a cream-tinted ground, rich daubs of garnet, blush pink, forest green and frost blue converge quixotically. The painting is rhapsodic, effulgent, the chromatic image of a symphonic crescendo. Created in 2008 during a period of great critical acclaim, Untitled stands among the last works Förg ever produced, a vibrant example of his celebrated Spot Paintings. The series began almost by accident: while water colouring, Förg would wipe his brush clean on a sheet of paper he kept next to his desk, and the overlapping impressions soon began to enthrall the artist. In the vein of his haphazard dabs and blotches, here Förg lets the daubs guide the image; as critic Kirsty Bell explains, ‘the brushstroke itself, always responsible for much of the character of Förg’s works, has now become a chief protagonist, treated as both means and iconography of the picture’ (K. Bell, ‘Günther Förg and the Edges of the Visual Field’ in M. Fox (ed.), Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty, exh. cat. Dallas Museum of Art, 2018, p. 223).
The material qualities of painting and colour have fascinated Förg since his studies at the Academy of Fine Art Munich. With an eye towards to past, he engaged his predecessors on the nature of abstraction. Yet rather than recuperating their gestures, writes curator Gavin Delahunty, Förg instead 'raise[d] the spectres of modernism, precisely to underscore their obsolescence. His objects are contaminated with modernist elements that are emptied of any cultural value’ (G. Delahunty, ‘Günther Förg: Apparitions of Modernism’, ibid., p. 72). By the turn of the millennium, Förg had moved away from his austere colour fields towards a freer, more subjective style. Colour’s agency—always a central preoccupation—remained crucial, but traces of Förg’s hand now became visible, evident in the painterly marks of Untitled. For the artist, such experimentation affirmed the endurance of the medium in the twenty-first century: ‘I think painting is a resilient practice,’ he said. ‘If you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg Karlsruhe’, 1997).
The material qualities of painting and colour have fascinated Förg since his studies at the Academy of Fine Art Munich. With an eye towards to past, he engaged his predecessors on the nature of abstraction. Yet rather than recuperating their gestures, writes curator Gavin Delahunty, Förg instead 'raise[d] the spectres of modernism, precisely to underscore their obsolescence. His objects are contaminated with modernist elements that are emptied of any cultural value’ (G. Delahunty, ‘Günther Förg: Apparitions of Modernism’, ibid., p. 72). By the turn of the millennium, Förg had moved away from his austere colour fields towards a freer, more subjective style. Colour’s agency—always a central preoccupation—remained crucial, but traces of Förg’s hand now became visible, evident in the painterly marks of Untitled. For the artist, such experimentation affirmed the endurance of the medium in the twenty-first century: ‘I think painting is a resilient practice,’ he said. ‘If you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now’ (G. Förg, quoted in D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting: Interview with Günther Förg Karlsruhe’, 1997).