|
Günther Förg: Roter Akt [Red Nude], 1982
-> further Works in the Exhibition
Thomas Groetz
Laconic Adaptations and Nebulous Abysses.
On the Art of Günther Förg
The achievement and significance of Günther Förg are closely connected with the particular situation at the time in which he made his important contributions, especially in painting and spatial installation. This situation – associated as it was with the concept of the postmodern and the feeling of slipping ever more into oblivion – also signifies a historical caesura for our time, the effects of which it is difficult to estimate. This caesura appears most strikingly in the fine arts with respect to the category of form, and with a content which, though not always palpable, is nevertheless sufficiently connected. During the course of the 1970s, the former unity, interdependency of content and form, and the assumption of a ‘meaning’ in design elements were subject to radical questioning. The consequences of this caesura are relevant today more than ever, despite that under the cloak of a new dawn of artistic isms and the language of the 20th century, they are barely discernable.
All of a sudden, Günther Förg’s historically derived language of forms, and above all his language of abstraction, could be newly or differently perceived due to the above-mentioned historical caesura. It seemed as if Förg had created geometric abstraction from scratch in an astonishingly unique and trenchant manner.
After the death of his artistic colleague, Blinky Palermo, Förg pursued the latter’s European legacy of American Minimal Art from 1977, alongside an echo of the Constructivist avant-garde in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. The monolithic stringency and solemn totality of American creations were treated by Palermo or Förg in a light, laconic and nonchalant manner. Deliberate, small inaccuracies and flippancies in execution resulted in a novel type of tension and even a playful humor in the work, arranged with utmost pantency and clarity. Förg took up Palermo’s fundamental aesthetic stance and adapted several of the techniques and materials used by his former colleague, among which were the concepts of spatial installations, the picture carriers covered with colored fabrics, as well as aluminum grounding onmost of the vertical format paintings that were arranged in groups and series.
The various artistic methods of adaptation from which, in Förg’s case, an at times unique and powerfully radiant oeuvre emerged, were to become axiomatic for art from the 1980s on. Förg’s artistic standing lay not least in having presented a fundamental example of this practice of adaptation and re-evaluation.
Günther Förg made his first appearance in a climate one might characterize as bleak and hopeless, even nihilistic. In the years between 1973 (Förg’s first year as a student at The Academy of Fine Art Munich) and 1976, the artist painted almost exclusively black monochrome canvas pictures in acrylic, which, with the addition of a translucent grey, produced a milky, veiled surface effect. For the artist, these pictures, which are solely self-referential in their lackluster surface, possess the character of school blackboards. Whereas an artist such as Joseph Beuys used blackboards so as to make the content of his art clear, Förg captured the moment in metaphor, once the letters written on the board had been erased. [...]
Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg"
Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009
^
Works in the Exhibition
Günther Förg
Roter Akt, 1982
Red Nude
Color photography and acrylic on aluminum
100 x 360 cm
Günther Förg
ohne Titel, 1991
Acrylic on board
210 x 180 cm
Günther Förg
ohne Titel, 1991
untitled
Acrylic on board
210 x 180 cm
Günther Förg
ohne Titel, 1992
untitled
Acrylic on lead on board
150 x 110 cm
Günther Förg
Großer Torso, 1993
Big Torso
Bronze
108 x 46 x 46 cm
^
Günther Förg
Roter Akt
[Red Nude]
1982
Colour photography and acrylic on aluminum
100 x 360 cm
© Günther Förg
Foto: Wolfgang Günzel, Offenbach a.M.
^
|