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Lot Essay
‘The paintings are like poems instead of constructions; the colours unfold and expose each other, like a line of verse pushes the next line into profile. Sometimes they even rhyme’ (Rudi Fuchs)
A dazzling chromatic vision spanning two metres in width, the present work is a spectacular example of Günther Förg’s Tupfenbilder (‘Spot Paintings’). Splashes, daubs, scribbles and drips of colour dance across a pale ground, alive with painterly texture. Pale pinks and deep forest greens mingle with fiery orange and red; olive and violet hues meet rich blues and yellows. Created largely between 2007 and 2009, the ‘Spot Paintings’ represent the grand finale to Förg’s practice, and were the last canvases he made before he stopped painting in 2010. Partly inspired by photographs of Francis Bacon’s studio, where the artist had wiped his brush time and again upon the walls and doors, they celebrate the visceral joy of pigment and colour. In stark contrast to the weighty lead and wood paintings that dominated Förg’s earlier oeuvre, the present work is a wellspring of light, energy and freedom. For his final act, the artist abandoned all shreds of conceptualism, cementing his legacy as a painter.
Förg came to prominence in the 1980s, taking his place within a generation that included Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool. In a world disenchanted with painting, many of these young artists sought to unpack the medium from the inside out, taking a sledgehammer to its conventions and remixing genres, styles and media. Förg shared some of the concerns of his contemporaries: his early grey monochromes, inspired by the teachings of Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo and Robert Ryman, took to task the language of Minimalism with their tactile, sensuous surfaces. His lead works, similarly, aped and undermined the aesthetics of hard-edged abstraction and colour field painting, their vast planes of pigment disrupted by the volatility of the metal beneath.
In many respects, however, Förg diverged from the subversive tactics of his peers. While Oehlen and others championed ‘bad painting’—painting that deliberately flouted traditional aesthetic standards—Förg appealed to the medium’s capacity for beauty. He rejected the lofty ideals of Abstract Expressionism, which saw painting as a vehicle for transcendence. Instead, he believed its power lay in its immediate visual impact. Painting, he believed, should not have to put forward a point about art’s purpose: it should simply be allowed to exist. ‘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).
It was ultimately in the ‘Spot Paintings’ that this belief finally came to a head. Förg had been experimenting with blotting watercolours at the time, and—inspired by the image of Bacon’s studio—decided to explore the potential of these markings on a larger scale. For the first time in his practice, paint was truly free. There was no material interference; there were no illusory depths. There were no ironic allusions to art history, but rather joyful echoes of Monet, Derain, Twombly and other great colourists of the past. It is perhaps no coincidence that—as the critic Suzanne Hudson noted—the ‘Spot Paintings’ resemble artists’ palettes (S. Hudson, ‘Günther Förg. Greene Naftali Gallery’, Artforum, 2012). The curator Rudi Fuchs, meanwhile, compared them to lines of interlocking poetry, hailing their ‘sparkling behaviour, as elusive as light on water’ (R. Fuchs, Günther Förg: Back and Forth, Cologne 2008, pp. 9-10). In the present canvas, Förg loses himself to the unfettered pleasures of paint, declaring his life’s work complete.
A dazzling chromatic vision spanning two metres in width, the present work is a spectacular example of Günther Förg’s Tupfenbilder (‘Spot Paintings’). Splashes, daubs, scribbles and drips of colour dance across a pale ground, alive with painterly texture. Pale pinks and deep forest greens mingle with fiery orange and red; olive and violet hues meet rich blues and yellows. Created largely between 2007 and 2009, the ‘Spot Paintings’ represent the grand finale to Förg’s practice, and were the last canvases he made before he stopped painting in 2010. Partly inspired by photographs of Francis Bacon’s studio, where the artist had wiped his brush time and again upon the walls and doors, they celebrate the visceral joy of pigment and colour. In stark contrast to the weighty lead and wood paintings that dominated Förg’s earlier oeuvre, the present work is a wellspring of light, energy and freedom. For his final act, the artist abandoned all shreds of conceptualism, cementing his legacy as a painter.
Förg came to prominence in the 1980s, taking his place within a generation that included Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool. In a world disenchanted with painting, many of these young artists sought to unpack the medium from the inside out, taking a sledgehammer to its conventions and remixing genres, styles and media. Förg shared some of the concerns of his contemporaries: his early grey monochromes, inspired by the teachings of Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo and Robert Ryman, took to task the language of Minimalism with their tactile, sensuous surfaces. His lead works, similarly, aped and undermined the aesthetics of hard-edged abstraction and colour field painting, their vast planes of pigment disrupted by the volatility of the metal beneath.
In many respects, however, Förg diverged from the subversive tactics of his peers. While Oehlen and others championed ‘bad painting’—painting that deliberately flouted traditional aesthetic standards—Förg appealed to the medium’s capacity for beauty. He rejected the lofty ideals of Abstract Expressionism, which saw painting as a vehicle for transcendence. Instead, he believed its power lay in its immediate visual impact. Painting, he believed, should not have to put forward a point about art’s purpose: it should simply be allowed to exist. ‘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).
It was ultimately in the ‘Spot Paintings’ that this belief finally came to a head. Förg had been experimenting with blotting watercolours at the time, and—inspired by the image of Bacon’s studio—decided to explore the potential of these markings on a larger scale. For the first time in his practice, paint was truly free. There was no material interference; there were no illusory depths. There were no ironic allusions to art history, but rather joyful echoes of Monet, Derain, Twombly and other great colourists of the past. It is perhaps no coincidence that—as the critic Suzanne Hudson noted—the ‘Spot Paintings’ resemble artists’ palettes (S. Hudson, ‘Günther Förg. Greene Naftali Gallery’, Artforum, 2012). The curator Rudi Fuchs, meanwhile, compared them to lines of interlocking poetry, hailing their ‘sparkling behaviour, as elusive as light on water’ (R. Fuchs, Günther Förg: Back and Forth, Cologne 2008, pp. 9-10). In the present canvas, Förg loses himself to the unfettered pleasures of paint, declaring his life’s work complete.