Günther FörgAller / Retour

Breathtaking in its direct reproduction, the follow-up volume to “Back and Forth” now presents more than 100 pastels that Günther Förg worked through in the late summer of 2009. With soft, shadowy areas the artist responds to colour-field compositions set down with a hard line. When he then fixes the sheet and shakes out the surplus pigment, the latter settles over the work like a light, barely perceptible veil. In return, time and again the palette undergoes an astonishing transformation from heavy to light, by way of bright and crazy to oppressive and full. Such is his masterly handling of the plane: at one moment he closes it with vehement, almost frantic patches, at another he lets them step calmly and majestically into a white field. Produced in three formats, the pastels invite a constant back and forth in the viewing: only the eye, when they fill a double-page spread one after the other, and always the alert hand, when it turns the pages forwards and back, to reassure itself, to compare remembering with seeing, perceiving with ascertaining, could tell their story. For it is precisely then that Günther Förg’s abstraction, in its most extreme form, captivates every concentration.