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拍品专文
‘Really, painting should be sexy. It should be sensual. These are things that will always escape the concept’ (Günther Förg)
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, Untitled (2004) is a striking monumental work that exemplifies Günther Förg’s bold, playful conceptual dialogue with twentieth-century painting. It is three metres high and almost four-and-a-half metres across, creating an immersive vista that evokes the power of an Abstract Expressionist colour field. The ground consists of a broad-brushed, active surface of cerulean blue. Laid over the right half is the form of a large window. Bright orange with a black frame, this motif recalls the geometric Modernism of artists such as Piet Mondrian. It also transforms the work into a potentially figurative depiction of a wall, and brings it into conversation with architectural form.
Förg rose to prominence in 1980s Germany. During the heyday of Neo-Expressionist figuration, he instead took an experimental and critical approach towards abstraction. Focusing on colour, material and space, he created a diverse body of work that encompassed painting, drawing, murals, sculpture and photography. He looked to twentieth-century modernism as his toolbox, using tropes such as the monochrome, the grid and the colour-field in a way that broke them down to their physical components, discarding any transcendent ideals. ‘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).
Windows were a key structural element in Förg’s work. They appeared in various guises, including as cross-barred silhouettes painted directly onto walls, in canvases teeming with grids and lattices, and in his large-scale photographs of Modernist buildings. Förg presented the latter in heavy glazed frames which, he explained, made the work itself into a window, and reflected the viewer’s own image back at them. The present painting offers a similar play with the architectural environment it inhabits, oscillating between pictorial illusion and flat abstraction. Förg’s animated, textural brushwork lends this intellectual proposition a beguiling beauty, creating ‘the intermingling of the expressive and the rational’ that he deemed to be painting’s most fascinating quality (G. Förg, quoted in D. Dietrich, ‘An Interview with Günther Förg’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, August 1989, p. 84). There may be no other dimension beyond the window, but for Förg the picture plane itself was a world of rich imaginative potential.
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner, Untitled (2004) is a striking monumental work that exemplifies Günther Förg’s bold, playful conceptual dialogue with twentieth-century painting. It is three metres high and almost four-and-a-half metres across, creating an immersive vista that evokes the power of an Abstract Expressionist colour field. The ground consists of a broad-brushed, active surface of cerulean blue. Laid over the right half is the form of a large window. Bright orange with a black frame, this motif recalls the geometric Modernism of artists such as Piet Mondrian. It also transforms the work into a potentially figurative depiction of a wall, and brings it into conversation with architectural form.
Förg rose to prominence in 1980s Germany. During the heyday of Neo-Expressionist figuration, he instead took an experimental and critical approach towards abstraction. Focusing on colour, material and space, he created a diverse body of work that encompassed painting, drawing, murals, sculpture and photography. He looked to twentieth-century modernism as his toolbox, using tropes such as the monochrome, the grid and the colour-field in a way that broke them down to their physical components, discarding any transcendent ideals. ‘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).
Windows were a key structural element in Förg’s work. They appeared in various guises, including as cross-barred silhouettes painted directly onto walls, in canvases teeming with grids and lattices, and in his large-scale photographs of Modernist buildings. Förg presented the latter in heavy glazed frames which, he explained, made the work itself into a window, and reflected the viewer’s own image back at them. The present painting offers a similar play with the architectural environment it inhabits, oscillating between pictorial illusion and flat abstraction. Förg’s animated, textural brushwork lends this intellectual proposition a beguiling beauty, creating ‘the intermingling of the expressive and the rational’ that he deemed to be painting’s most fascinating quality (G. Förg, quoted in D. Dietrich, ‘An Interview with Günther Förg’, The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 3, August 1989, p. 84). There may be no other dimension beyond the window, but for Förg the picture plane itself was a world of rich imaginative potential.