Günther Förg - Felder-Ränder

Günther Förg (1952–2013)

As the editor of this catalouge Rudi Fuchs writing:: »There is some chronology in Günther Förg’s work: when he used a certain stratagem for the first time and what then came next. But with his way of working, that makes little sense. Mondrian, in his abstract phase, seemed to have made one variation after another, each one more precise than the previous one. There is this sense of progress in his art. Instead, Günther Förg circles around. There is no reason then why a certain plot cannot be used again. In each new use of a plot new effects will reveal themselves that, as pictorial knowledge, become part of his ever growing repertoire. Look, for instance, at this plot: painting grids of fairly short crossing lines. The grids can be loose or dense, rich or frugal in colour. Eventually one can also vary the length of lines or one can loosely combine, randomly, fragments of different grids in some sort of collage. Then, in the recent Zürich exhibition I saw a painting with a very dense grid in flaming red, intense as I had never seen before. Another new invention: apparently the grid method, in the relaxed way Günther Förg employs it, is inexhaustible. He is an adventurer. It was the instinct of the early abstract masters to control their practice. They were very cautious, Mondrian and Malevich. From their writing we know how much they saw their art as deeply spiritual. They needed that sense of comfort. Schwitters and Mirò were less principled but still carried with them, as a responsibility, the philosophic specialness of making abstract art. None of such inhibitions bother Günther Förg. Therefore he was able, laconically plotting constructions for pictures, to open up and realize the entire spectre of visual richness that only abstract art can offer. After a long career in geometric art, his great colleague Sol Lewitt began to make colourful drawings with swerving, undulating lines. A lapse of principle? That is what some critics thought: that Sol had gone astray. Why, they asked. Sol was briefly silent and then said: Why not? Indeed. That is where, also in Günther Förg’s work, abstract art, the great modern invention, has finally arrived–at the total, unrestricted, fearless command of all its ways and means.«