Günther Förg’s body of work is a dedication to color, a ceaseless endeavor to reveal its intrinsic nature and the sheer endless wealth of its variations through ever-new combinations. His painting effortlessly unites seemingly incompatible elements on the canvas, blending Concrete Art with gestural components: geometric rigor meets expressive spontaneity, and a calculated system meets the spontaneous intuition of color application.
He transforms the pictorial surface into an open structure of color, light, and gestural movement. Through these means, he challenges established traditions of art history and, more specifically, the “masterpieces” of Modernism that have been elevated to icon status. Through this fusion, Günther Förg developed a distinctive, independent visual language, making himself an icon of Contemporary Art.

Whether in his serial works, grid paintings, lead paintings, or late large-format works, Förg’s paintings had to turn out right in one go; the pictorial event had to be realized in a single stroke, in just one layer of paint. Time and again, Förg’s painting stylistically engages with other artists. In addition to influences from pre-war Abstract Modernism, Constructivism, and Suprematism, the work of the prematurely deceased Blinky Palermo played a formative role for the art student Förg in the 1970s. Later, American Action Painting and Color Field Painting—such as the works of Willem de Kooning, Clifford Still, and Barnett Newman—also emerged as sources of inspiration. Förg adapted and transformed what he saw, repeatedly harnessing new impulses in color or form for his diverse work. The decisive source of inspiration for Förg’s large-format grid paintings—which he has been creating since the 1990s and which include our luminous composition—comes not only from the grid- or cross-like linear structures that regularly appear in Paul Klee’s watercolors from 1913 onward, but also from the late work of Edvard Munch. Förg’s grid paintings transform and alienate these art-historical influences—so significant to the development of modern painting—as he transposes Munch’s motifs and gestural style into abstract painting. Klee’s works are small and graphic; Munch’s paintings are figurative, whereas Förg’s creations are monumental and painterly. In his famous grid paintings, Förg achieves enormous impact and color intensity, derived solely from the luminosity of the color and the contrast between surface and structure. [EH]