"Förg uses the idiom of geometric abstraction with the same naturalness with which Monet used the lilies in his garden pond: material and forms that happen to be at hand, easily available as the vehicle for aesthetic sensibility, painterly style and vision."
An exuberant, criss-crossing network of lines in vibrant hues of red, green, black, grey, and yellow, Günther Förg’s Untitled envelopes the viewer in a haze of intoxicating colour. The present work is part of Förg’s Gitterbilder, or Grid Paintings, begun in the early 1990s, which saw the artist move away from his expressive monochrome works in favour of more intuitive and informal matrices of line and colour. Förg was not interested in the conceptual examination of a painting, but rather in its composition, displaying a distinctly tactile and sensorial understanding of gestural abstraction. For the artist, painting represented far more than its conceptual starting point, and became a celebration of colour, medium, and form.
A continuation of Förg’s earlier series of Fenster-Aquarelle, or Window Watercolours, the Grid Paintings are characterised by a dynamic mesh of vertical and horizontal lines that cross enticingly over the surface of the canvas, calling into question the very act of painting itself. As Förg himself explained, his practice sought to produce “paintings that are reduced to painting itself, to their own essence” (the artist quoted in: “Günther Förg In His Own Words”, Hauser & Wirth, May 2019, online). Förg skillfully re-imagines the canon of gestural abstraction, calling upon Barnett Newman’s profound compositional devices, Cy Twombly’s lyrical and frenetic paintings, and the biomorphic visual language of Brice Marden. His lyrical brush work and bright palette also pay homage to artists like Edvard Munch and Claude Monet, taking inspiration from their masterful use of line and dazzling colour within his compositions.
“I mentioned Munch earlier, the kind of freedom that we get from his very late work is astonishing. He needed objects, a room or a figure, but the work isn't about these at all, it's about how can you go with painting to the edge...what is possible in painting. It's a free place that he found here. And it doesn't matter whether the subject is a tree or a figure, the painting goes beyond the subject.”
The thick, sweeping brushstrokes in the present work are simultaneously expressionistic and intimate, gestural and precise, abstract and representational. Förg’s abstraction simultaneously elicits and challenges the notion of painting as a portal or window into another world. Intoxicating in its presentation of space, depth, colour and scale, Untitled poignantly and self-reflexively addresses what it means to create a painting. By defining abstraction as an expression among many others, through works such as the present composition, Förg reoriented the dialogue for minimalist art and situated himself amongst the most significant artists of the 20th Century.