About the Artist

Born in 1952 in Füssen, Germany (in the Allgäu region), Günther Förg was a prolific artist whose multidisciplinary output included experiments in abstraction and monochrome painting and ambitious, sustained investigations into new materials and philosophies.

Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work that includes sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, and drawing - often in combination.

Förg's painterly formulations are a consideration of the medium itself, and are in dialogue with the heroes of contemporary painting – such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworksth Kelly and Blinky Palermo – and with the aesthetics of Bauhaus architecture. Förg manages to redirect the media he employs by painting picture surfaces like a house painter, by composing rooms like a worksman, by composing photographs a la Godard.

Förg studied from 1973 until 1979 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Karl Fred Dahmen. In these years, Förg developed a practice grounded almost exclusively in grey and black monochrome canvas pictures in acrylic. As he stated, ‘Grey is nothing: not white, not black. Something in between. Not concerned with the figure. Something free.’

Förg started using photography in his work at the beginning of the 1980s. His photographs of buildings with cultural and political significance — Bauhaus structures in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, for example, or Fascist ones in Italy — were taken from unusual, sharp-angled perspectives, with off-center framing and often in grainy focus, suggestive of painting. Many of the photographs are views taken through windows that draw attention to transitions from interior to exterior space.

For some years Förg pursued a purely photographic practice as a reaction against painting itself. He would later reflect that his use of photography was a method of ‘working closer to reality,’ stating, ‘what one paints is not reality.’

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his photographic works achieved critical acclaim and were exhibited at major museums internationally, including the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY. During this time, Förg also began experimenting with the exhibition space itself, painting over the gallery walls, and positioning photographs against his own paintings.


Förg entered a new phase of experimentation in the late 1980s, which brought him back to painting, but also included the embrace of new materials for him, such wood, copper, bronze, and lead. In the early 1980s, Förg made his so-called Alubilder – assemblages of aluminum sheeting onto which he had painted linear patterns or portrait photographs. For his series of paintings on lead, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, he wrapped lead sheets over wooden frames, then painted each surface with acrylic, creating pieces that blur the line between painting and sculpture.

By the 2000s, Förg shifted away from the formality of minimalism, incorporating a brighter palette and more expressive hand with a series of grid-like marks and intersecting colors. The ‘Gitterbilder’ (grid paintings)—command a similar freedom of form and sensuality that led to comparisons to Cy Twombly. The roots for these pieces, however, are to be found in an earlier series, the so-called "Fenster-Aquarelle" (window watercolors): the crossbar forms a grid for the space in the image, which provides the frame for a whole flow of paintings without limiting their free display and development.

Other works from this era portray vast canvases of negative space interrupted by colorful, gestural hatching and mark-making.

From 1992 until 1999, he taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. From 1999 onward he was a professor in Munich at his alma mater The Academy of Fine Arts. He had a home in Areuse, Switzerland, as well as in Freiburg. In 1993 he married artist Ika Huber.

Förg died on his 61st birthday on December 5, 2013 in Freiburg, Germany.

In the artist’s own words, ‘I think painting is a resilient practice; if you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now.’

His works are in collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, the Sammlung Haubrok and the Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum, Bonn; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.


Biographical sources include: Artnet, Hauser and Wirth, Galerie Max Hetzler, DeBrock Gallery, Schellmann Art

One-person exhibitions:

1982: Galerie Achim Kubinski, Stuttgart
1983: Galerie Max Hetzler, Stuttgart
1991: Kunsthalle Tübingen: Günther Förg, 10. August - 15. September 1991
2003: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2005: Max Dudler, Günther Förg, Architektur Galerie, Berlin
2006: Günther Förg – Raum und Fläche – Fotografien, Kunsthalle Bremen
2007: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
2007: Museum der Stadt Füssen, Füssen
2007: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2008: Günther Förg – BACK AND FORTH, Essl Museum – Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg/Wien, Katalog Essl Museum
2009: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
2010: Günther Förg – Wandmalerei und Fotografie, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg
2010: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2011: Günther Förg – Bilder, Wandmalereien und Fotografie 1987–2011, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
2014: Günther Förg., Museum Brandhorst, München
2016: FÖRG - Günther Förg aus der Sammlung Kopp München, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen



Important public collections:

Germany:
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Lenbachhaus, Munich
Daimler Contemporary, Berlin
Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin
Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz
MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg
Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen
Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main
Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt am Main
Städel, Frankfurt/Main
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe
Museum Kurhaus Kleve
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GfZK, Leipzig
Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Kunstraum Grässlin, St. Georgen
Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg

Austria:
Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg/Vienna

Canada:
AGO, Toronto
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

The Netherlands:
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Switzerland:
Swiss Re, Zurich

United Kingdom:
Tate Modern, London

United States:
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
MOCA, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA

Scandinavia:
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark

Biographical sources: Hauser and Wirth, Artnet

Download Full Biography