Günther Förg's painting is a devotion to color, the unceasing attempt to bring out its inner life and its almost infinite richness of variation through ever-new combinations of color and material. With apparent ease, Förg combines the seemingly incompatible elements of concrete art with gestural components, rigor with spontaneity, and a calculated system with the spontaneous intuition of applying paint. Whether in his grid pictures, lead pictures, color fields, or his rare, large-format copper paintings created between 1987 and 1990, the execution of Förg's painting must succeed in just one go. Repeatedly, Förg sought stylistic dialog with other artists. Alongside influences from Abstract Pre-War Modernism, Constructivism, and Suprematism, American Action and Color Field Painting also played a decisive role.



However, his rare works on copper, with their vibrant vertical lines reflecting the light, were inspired by the avant-garde paintings of Lucio Fontana. In a radical gesture of piercing the canvas, Fontana proclaimed the hole his artistic signature in 1949. With his “Bucchi” (Holes) and the subsequent iconic “Tagli” (Cuts), which Fontana grouped under the title “Concetto Spaziale,” today considered icons of post-war Modernism not only for their enormous artistic progressiveness but also for their captivatingly reduced aesthetics, Fontana took a courageous step of great significance for art history. This reduced artistic style, which stands in contrast to the gestural painting of European informalism and American Action Painting, and which Fontana executed in his series “Concetto Spaziale, New York” on large copper plates, provided the decisive impetus for the young Förg to create a magnificent series of works on copper in 1987. Within just three years, he made large-format paintings on a reddish metallic background, on which he placed shiny concave vertical elements as an homage to Fontana's cuts.



Made in 1987, the present work is one of the very early paintings from this small series and one with the most sophisticated aesthetics. The reduced yet vibrant white tone, with its gentle green shimmer, applied in a gestural style, provides a unique contrast to the reddish color and the smooth, shiny surface of the copper. This captivating visual aesthetic results from Förg's unique artistic approach, his masterful play with art historical tradition, which he adapts and transforms with great confidence and repeatedly provides new and decisive impulses for his multifaceted work. In 2014, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich presented the first posthumous retrospective of the artist's work. In 2018, the retrospective “Günther Förg. A Fragile Beauty”, shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Dallas Museum of Art, followed in 2018. In 2023, the Long Museum in Shanghai presented a major retrospective. Förg's paintings are part of numerous international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. [JS]



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