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Lot Essay
Across a cool pale-grey ground, flurries of peach, orange, blue, deep green, crimson, yellow and white marks cluster in varying degrees of impasto. Painted in 2008, Untitled is an exceptionally vivid example of Günther Förg’s celebrated series of Tupfenbilder or ‘Spot Paintings’, which he executed between 2007 and 2009 in some of the final years of his life. Abandoning the heavy supports he had gravitated towards in the 1990s—volatile materials such as lead, wood and copper—his ‘spot paintings’ are markedly light and sensuous. They mark a jubilant celebration of painting itself—of pigment, brushwork, texture and viscosity. Here, each spot is a single, gleaming note amidst a triumphant chorus of technicolour. ‘One cannot even begin to appraise the effect of floating, dancing colours’, wrote Dutch art historian Rudi Fuchs. ‘Their sparkling behaviour, elusive as light on splashing water’ (R. Fuchs, Günther Förg: Back and Forth, Cologne 2008, pp. 9-10). Uninhibited and joyous, Untitled stands as a visual record of the artist’s late approach to painting as play.
Förg rose to prominence in the 1980s, amidst a climate in which his German contemporaries had pronounced the death of painting. Many sought to dismantle the medium’s core tenets, stripping away centuries of art historical convention and tradition in often irreverent or subversive ways. Förg charted his own course. Drawing inspiration from Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Blinky Palermo, he delighted in the material qualities of paint and questioned the nature of the picture plane. His earlier works had invited comparisons to the ‘Colour Field’ painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Where his Abstract Expressionist predecessors had positioned abstraction as a portal to cerebral, metaphysical realms, however, Förg’s work maintained roots in the world around him. ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, he said, ‘For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg: Painting/Sculpture/Installation, exh. cat. Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach 1989, p. 6).
The ‘Spot Paintings’ were in part inspired by photographs that Förg had seen of Francis Bacon’s studio, where blank walls and doors had functioned like an enormous mixing palette, bearing the haphazard traces of his workings. Vibrant splodges of pigment remain where he wiped excess paint from his brushes, clustering into abstract compositions of their own. Förg had himself been making watercolours at his desk during this time, using white sheets of paper to blot his brush between strokes. Pleased by these markings—the appearance of pure, unworked colour—he turned his attention to a series of large canvases. The present work is an especially accomplished example of Förg’s lyricism. The brushwork is distinctly notational and, evoking Cy Twombly’s scribble-like inscriptions, clusters of colour seem to record the artist’s innermost thoughts, to track his discoveries as he finds them.
The present painting demonstrates Förg’s close attention to the relationship between form, shape and colour—what the artist called ‘the intermingling of the expressive and the rational’ and deemed to be the most fascinating aspect of painting (G. Förg, quoted in D. Dietrich, ‘An Interview with Günther Förg’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, August 1989, p. 84). A close reader of art history, he was strongly influenced by Modernism, its proclivity for hard-edged geometry and clean, rectilinear structures. One is reminded of Piet Mondrian's gridded, primary-colour compositions when looking at Förg's oeuvre. Untitled, however, relishes in playful abandon. Released from constriction, Förg creates a painting about painting, and, as Gavin Delahunty has observed, ‘In the Spot paintings, Förg, for the first time, makes us absolutely aware of Förg’ (G. Delahunty, ‘Günther Förg: Apparitions of Modernism’, in ibid., p. 72).
Förg rose to prominence in the 1980s, amidst a climate in which his German contemporaries had pronounced the death of painting. Many sought to dismantle the medium’s core tenets, stripping away centuries of art historical convention and tradition in often irreverent or subversive ways. Förg charted his own course. Drawing inspiration from Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Blinky Palermo, he delighted in the material qualities of paint and questioned the nature of the picture plane. His earlier works had invited comparisons to the ‘Colour Field’ painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Where his Abstract Expressionist predecessors had positioned abstraction as a portal to cerebral, metaphysical realms, however, Förg’s work maintained roots in the world around him. ‘Newman and Rothko attempted to rehabilitate in their works a unity and an order that for them had been lost’, he said, ‘For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (G. Förg, quoted in Günther Förg: Painting/Sculpture/Installation, exh. cat. Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach 1989, p. 6).
The ‘Spot Paintings’ were in part inspired by photographs that Förg had seen of Francis Bacon’s studio, where blank walls and doors had functioned like an enormous mixing palette, bearing the haphazard traces of his workings. Vibrant splodges of pigment remain where he wiped excess paint from his brushes, clustering into abstract compositions of their own. Förg had himself been making watercolours at his desk during this time, using white sheets of paper to blot his brush between strokes. Pleased by these markings—the appearance of pure, unworked colour—he turned his attention to a series of large canvases. The present work is an especially accomplished example of Förg’s lyricism. The brushwork is distinctly notational and, evoking Cy Twombly’s scribble-like inscriptions, clusters of colour seem to record the artist’s innermost thoughts, to track his discoveries as he finds them.
The present painting demonstrates Förg’s close attention to the relationship between form, shape and colour—what the artist called ‘the intermingling of the expressive and the rational’ and deemed to be the most fascinating aspect of painting (G. Förg, quoted in D. Dietrich, ‘An Interview with Günther Förg’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, August 1989, p. 84). A close reader of art history, he was strongly influenced by Modernism, its proclivity for hard-edged geometry and clean, rectilinear structures. One is reminded of Piet Mondrian's gridded, primary-colour compositions when looking at Förg's oeuvre. Untitled, however, relishes in playful abandon. Released from constriction, Förg creates a painting about painting, and, as Gavin Delahunty has observed, ‘In the Spot paintings, Förg, for the first time, makes us absolutely aware of Förg’ (G. Delahunty, ‘Günther Förg: Apparitions of Modernism’, in ibid., p. 72).