Color & Brushstroke: Förg’s painting as a modern definition of positions in art history
“What I like doing is reacting to things”, is a famous quote by Günther Förg, making his outstanding art not just a devotion to color, but also a genuine masterpiece of adaptation and transformation. Versatile and ever-changing in style, his painting is consistently driven by a constant effort to reveal the intrinsic nature of color and its seemingly infinite variety through ever-new combinations and juxtapositions, rendered in his characteristic, gentle brushwork. Förg’s painting combines seemingly incompatible elements on the canvas with remarkable ease, uniting elements of Concrete Art with gestural components: geometric rigor meets expressive spontaneity, a calculated system meets the spontaneous intuition of paint application. Until the 1980s, Förg prepared his paintings with only very rough preliminary sketches and executed them in only one go. Whether in his grid paintings, lead paintings, or late large-scale works, Förg’s painting efforts had to be successful at the first attempt, with the pictorial event realized in a single stroke across a single layer of paint. Time and again, Förg’s paintings seek to engage with other artists. In addition to influences from abstract pre-war Modernism, Constructivism, and Suprematism, the work of the prematurely deceased Blinky Palermo played a formative role for the art student Förg in the 1970s. Since the 1980s, American Action, Minimal, Hard-Edge, and Color-Field Painting have exerted growing influence, particularly the work of Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman.

Kelly and Förg: How “Untitled” (1990) revisits American Color-Field Painting
Förg adapts and transforms what he sees, thereby continually harnessing novel impulses—both in color and form—for his multifaceted body of work. The present work, “Untitled” (1990), is an extraordinary composition: twelve lead panels in a subtly arranged, colorful presence, at once minimalist and gestural, delicately balanced and dominating the space. Ellsworth Kelly's multi-part monochromatic color panels served as the crucial source of inspiration for “Untitled” (1990); Günther Förg became familiar with these works before his trip to the United States in 1989, on the occasion of his solo exhibition “New Work: Günther Förg” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. At the time, Förg was 37 years old and fascinated with the multitude of novel impulses he found in American painting, particularly in Minimalism, Hard Edge, and Color Field Painting. Above all, with Ellsworth Kelly—who, since the late 1950s, had also created numerous colored spatial objects made of painted aluminum and his multi-panel monochromatic canvas paintings, the famous “Panel Paintings,” in which, unlike Förg, the paint is applied mostly without visible brushstrokes— Above all, Förg shared the enthusiasm for architecture and the ability to conceptualize the relationship between color and space with the American artist. Förg was fascinated with architecture and, since the early 1980s, has expressed this in a series of black-and-white photographs that focus primarily on surface and structure. Especially in his multi-part lead images, whose massive edges remain visible, raw, and unpainted, thereby creating an awareness of both the hardness and the depth of the picture support, Förg deliberately employs painting and color as elements of spatial structure. The young deceased Blinky Palermo, Förg’s central role model among German artists, had indeed already drawn significant inspiration from contemporary American painting and began creating structures from monochromatic color fields on thin aluminum panels as early as the 1970s, however, these works differ significantly from the massive creations of the young Förg not only in terms of their artistic approach but also due to their weightless, floating aesthetic. The maximum monochromatic reduction that characterizes “Untitled” (1990) is also rare and compelling in its painterly quality, for Förg has enveloped each of the 12 lead panels from edge to edge, creating an all-surface, monochromatic painterly skin. No vertical or diagonal line, whether unpainted or rendered in a different color, can—as in many of the artist’s other multi-panel lead paintings—distract from the almost meditative focus on the intrinsic value of color. Förg’s painting is not about a rhythmic lightness and the maximum dissolution of the boundaries of color, but rather about imparting maximum spatial presence to the intrinsic value of color through the massiveness of the image carrier.


Lead, Color, Space, Presence: Förg’s serial lead paintings as a central position in Color Field Painting
Our 12-part painting “Untitled” (1990), with its subtly nuanced, luminous, warm, and earthy colors, provides a particularly striking example of this aesthetically reduced artistic approach and exemplifies Förg’s unique ability to transform his observations into something entirely new. The New York Times paid tribute to Günther Förg’s multifaceted and highly intellectual body of work on the occasion of his untimely death at the age of just 51 in December 2013, noting: “A prolific multidisciplinary artist whose work is in permanent collections around the world—among them the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Modern in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York—Mr. Förg was both an ambitious artist and a penetratingly intellectual one.” (New York Times, December 18, 2013). In 2014, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich presented the first posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work. This was followed by the retrospective “Günther Förg. A Fragile Beauty” in 2018, which was on view at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2023, the Long Museum in Shanghai honored Förg’s artistic oeuvre—which ranks among the international canon of Color Field Painting—with the major solo exhibition “Günther Förg. Trunk Road and Branch Roads.” [JS]