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Lot Essay
Dating from a pivotal moment in Günther Förg’s practice, Untitled (1987) is an exceptional early example of his multi-part paintings on lead. Across ten panels, the artist plumbs the depths of his extraordinary medium, each surface rife with mesmerising, unpredictable textures. Colours and geometries converse across the suite, rhyming and clashing in hypnotic serial formation. Begun in the early 1980s, Förg’s lead paintings would come to define his oeuvre, offering a complex, volatile vehicle through which to explore the claims of Modernist abstraction. These works earnt him outstanding critical acclaim, which came to a head during the latter part of the decade. His multi-part paintings represent some of his most ambitious creations, with examples commissioned for major exhibitions at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Carnegie International and Newport Harbor Art Museum during this period. Another ten-panel work dating from 1987 is held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Förg came of age in a world uncertain about the future of painting. Unlike his contemporaries Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, who plundered the medium’s histories with riotous abandon, the artist took a more measured, nuanced approach. His works riffed on the language of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian and others who had sought new purpose for abstraction. Where many of these artists had pursued transcendental enlightenment through painting, however, Förg maintained that ‘abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (quoted in Günther Förg: Painting/Sculpture /Installation, exh. cat., Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1989, p. 6). Painting, he believed, should be free and sensual, unburdened by the weight of rhetoric and theory. ‘It should always escape the concept’, he explained (in conversation with D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting’, Karlsruhe, 1997). By utilising lead as his support—along with other unusual media including cloth, wood, aluminium and copper—he sought to redirect attention away from the metaphysical, and to focus instead upon the raw, tactile qualities of paint.
By the time of the present work, Förg had achieved considerable professional recognition, culminating in his first US museum show at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1988. At the centre of this rise to fame were the lead paintings. These works, he explained, developed out of his early series of grey monochromes, with ‘the dark support [taking] over the function of the black primer’. The artist would leave vast lead sheets outside his studio, subjecting them to the effects of weather and oxidisation. He then applied pigment in multiple thin layers, without washing or changing the brushes. ‘Colours emerge, the paintings become more open, and even the material’s arbitrary elements on the surface and in the patina become part of the picture,’ he explained (quoted in D. Anfam, ‘Günther Förg: Weights and Measures’, in Günther Förg: Paintings on Lead, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2006, p. 7).
These qualities are exquisitely demonstrated by the present work. In places paint and support become almost inextinguishable: the texture of the lead emerges through the veils of pigment, its mercurial surface at odds with the geometric forms that adorn it. In his commentary on the 1987 lead paintings, the art historian David Anfam notes that ‘the metal is an emotive substance: heavy, base, toxic yet malleable’. He marvels at ‘how the thinly fluent paint seems to … float tensely over sombre substrata’, as well as the ‘wrinkles, folds and other incidents that intrude like humble material reminders, pressures from the everyday, into the rich spectrum of the overall chromatic scheme.’ The serial arrangement of panels, he writes, is ‘especially critical … implying that each is a fragment keyed to a larger whole’ (ibid.). In the present work, forms and colours strain for unity, but are ultimately subverted by the wild, thrilling instabilities of lead.
Förg came of age in a world uncertain about the future of painting. Unlike his contemporaries Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, who plundered the medium’s histories with riotous abandon, the artist took a more measured, nuanced approach. His works riffed on the language of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian and others who had sought new purpose for abstraction. Where many of these artists had pursued transcendental enlightenment through painting, however, Förg maintained that ‘abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more’ (quoted in Günther Förg: Painting/Sculpture /Installation, exh. cat., Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1989, p. 6). Painting, he believed, should be free and sensual, unburdened by the weight of rhetoric and theory. ‘It should always escape the concept’, he explained (in conversation with D. Ryan, ‘Talking Painting’, Karlsruhe, 1997). By utilising lead as his support—along with other unusual media including cloth, wood, aluminium and copper—he sought to redirect attention away from the metaphysical, and to focus instead upon the raw, tactile qualities of paint.
By the time of the present work, Förg had achieved considerable professional recognition, culminating in his first US museum show at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1988. At the centre of this rise to fame were the lead paintings. These works, he explained, developed out of his early series of grey monochromes, with ‘the dark support [taking] over the function of the black primer’. The artist would leave vast lead sheets outside his studio, subjecting them to the effects of weather and oxidisation. He then applied pigment in multiple thin layers, without washing or changing the brushes. ‘Colours emerge, the paintings become more open, and even the material’s arbitrary elements on the surface and in the patina become part of the picture,’ he explained (quoted in D. Anfam, ‘Günther Förg: Weights and Measures’, in Günther Förg: Paintings on Lead, exh. cat., Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2006, p. 7).
These qualities are exquisitely demonstrated by the present work. In places paint and support become almost inextinguishable: the texture of the lead emerges through the veils of pigment, its mercurial surface at odds with the geometric forms that adorn it. In his commentary on the 1987 lead paintings, the art historian David Anfam notes that ‘the metal is an emotive substance: heavy, base, toxic yet malleable’. He marvels at ‘how the thinly fluent paint seems to … float tensely over sombre substrata’, as well as the ‘wrinkles, folds and other incidents that intrude like humble material reminders, pressures from the everyday, into the rich spectrum of the overall chromatic scheme.’ The serial arrangement of panels, he writes, is ‘especially critical … implying that each is a fragment keyed to a larger whole’ (ibid.). In the present work, forms and colours strain for unity, but are ultimately subverted by the wild, thrilling instabilities of lead.