Günther Förg: Aller / Retour

Colours

The follow-up volume with over 100 pastels to "Back and Forth", which Günther Förg worked through in the late summer of 2009, is breathtaking in its direct reproduction. With soft, shadowy surfaces, the artist reacts to colour field compositions set with hard strokes. When he then fixes the sheet and shakes out the superfluous pigment, it covers the work like a light, barely perceptible veil. Instead, the colour palette undergoes an astonishing transformation from heavy to light, from bright and crazy to oppressive and full. This is his confident handling of the surface, so he sometimes closes it with violent, almost hectic blotches, sometimes he lets them step calmly and majestically into a white field. The pastels, created in three formats, invite constant back and forth contemplation: only the eye, when they successively fill a double page, always the alert hand, when it flips back and forth, for a reassurance, for the comparison of remembering with seeing, perceiving with reassurance, could tell their story. It is precisely then that Günther Förg's abstraction in its most extreme form captivates all concentration.