Günther Förg

Günther Förg’s multifaceted artistic exploration spanned painting, graphic design, sculpture, and photography. Born in 1952 in Füssen, Bavaria, Förg studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. There, he was immersed in Art Informel, a gestural form of abstraction. He enthusiastically engaged with art history, riffing upon and borrowing from his Modernist predecessors. 

Förg came to prominence in a world desperately seeking new directions for painting. Among his contemporaries were artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner — the so-called ‘Hetzler boys’ — who congregated around Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne during the 1980s. Whilst many of these artists championed a wild, subversive dismantling of painting’s traditions, Förg pursued a more rigorous, thoughtful agenda.

Abandoning painting for much of the 1980s in favour of photography, he eventually returned to the medium, harnessing a variety of different supports including wood, copper and bronze as well as lead and canvas. Grounding his approach in art history, his early influences included Georg Baselitz, Robert Ryman and Blinky Palermo: all artists who had systematically disrupted the medium’s conventions. Visually, however, his works invited greater comparison with Colour Field painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who engaged with notions of transcendence and the sublime. Unlike his predecessors, however, Förg was less interested in the metaphysical power of the medium than in its raw physical properties.

Förg’s lead works were central to his oeuvre, allowing him to explore the relationships between artwork and object, material and form, which fascinated him throughout his career. He was particularly interested in the effect of the soft, malleable qualities of the lead that became visible through the thin layers of paint which he applied to the surface. His masterpiece, Untitled (1990), a monumental acrylic on lead in 22 paintings, established the artist’s auction record in 2020 at Christie’s London, selling for £1,331,250.

Förg began the ‘grid paintings’ in the early 1990s, using the lattice motif from his earlier series, the Fenster-Aquarelle or Window Watercolours. For the artist, each series was finite, with a specific and planned ending, but he often reincarnated certain motifs or gestures and gave them new forms. Förg’s ‘spot paintings’, created between 2007 and 2009, standing among his final works. They represent the grand culmination of a practice that, since the 1980s, had rigorously interrogated the interaction between colour, material and form. These works were a departure away from the density of his ‘window’ and ‘grid’ works, embracing light, space and vast scale.

Günther Förg passed away in 2013, but his legacy continues to influence and inspire. His works now belong in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate in London and many more.