Lot 635 D

There is no doubt, Günther Förg had a wonderfully generous, artistic attitude with which he exploited the interactions and interplay of the disciplines of painting, sculpture and photography and developed an exceptionally effective aesthetic in programs and series of works. Förg often referred to leading representatives of modernism such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still or Blinky Palermo and their consistently thematic specifications, such as concrete and monochrome structures, which Förg regarded as legitimate starting material for his own works. Therefore he uses, or rather transforms the experienced, the seen, to create compositions of absolutely balanced relationships which make the now visible image appear as an excerpt from the similar image-universe. “He who can't see the role models and quotations, misjudges Förg's work”, said the art collector Reiner Speck. And indeed, Förg plays with the quick impulse of recognition, stands by the unavoidable oh yes of course, provokes a déjà-vu, to score with an elegantly decorative -not to say astonished, again (every time) - immensely presumptuous beauty. But at the same time, despite all the similarities and duplications, there are fine discrepancies, such as here the provocative use of thinly rolled lead rather than the categorical canvas, the combination and relation of two monochrome colour spaces, a resolutely chosen monochrome, with a well-placed colour combination, extremely aesthetic, and, typically for the artist, executed with elegant simplicity. The division is set here with the contrast between the tones “lead” and a “rust-like Corten”, or there with “cobalt blue”-like and “turquoise”-like values. The compositional principal, which seems apparently clear on the formal level, achieves an optically and atmospherically surprising certainty with the instinctively and impulsively selected colour tones, the unusual support and the chosen format.