Lot 850 R

Günther Förg's 'window pictures' have various roots. In one way, they are related to the 'grid pictures', they solidify essential components in a concentrated form so that ultimately the window, with the mullion and transom as motif, naturally becomes the subject matter of a picture. Compositions of this kind are also due to an ever recurring occupation with the theme of windows, sometimes also in picture cycles. The architectural motif of the window occupies a large portion of Förg's photography as seen with the examination of the house of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in Vienna in the 1980s, the documentation of the historical company buildings of IG Farben in Frankfurt am Main, or photographic research in Prague, Istanbul, Moscow, Ankara, Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Förg thematises buildings and monuments from the architectural history of modernism. The artist's watercolours also circle these themes, depict views inside and outside, awaken transparency except for a few moments such as the window frame, such as the screen, the grid of the mullion and transom. During the examination, work processes with a particular momentum develop. Förg develops the form principles he has studied in an impulsively spontaneous working method into a pictorial gesture which is inclined to undermine the concrete form of the window and implement it with a very simple quotation in large-scale painting, the pretence, after all, of a black window frame and bright window space without any painterly perspective.