Günther Förg: Back and Forth

Always on the move

Over 100 new abstract canvases, carefully reproduced in this book in an unusual format, are the result of one of Günther Förg's most intensive phases of work in recent years between late autumn 2008 and spring 2009. The artist sets a sequence of well-calculated colour fields in a basic grid that changes from format to format, with each individual picture having a colourful rhythm that is characterised by a high degree of artistic and physical concentration. It is therefore no coincidence that Rudi Fuchs finds an affinity between this work and Piet Mondrian's last and most unusual painting, "Victory Boogie Woogie", in his linguistically stirring, yet precisely observant text. However, the organisation of the palette of colours, complemented by the structure of the individual colour fields, is what makes Günther Förg's work so different from its predecessors. It is rather the free movement of the brushstroke, the slight upward and more forceful downward movements, in addition to the choice of colour, that catapult each individual composition beyond the results of all the abstraction we have known so far. Or as Rudi Fuchs concludes: "Whether he was painting vibrating colour fields, irregular grids of raw fibrous lines, he always incorporated clever strategies of refraction into their execution. Figuration had to give way in order to release the primal energy of brushstrokes in their purest form: fierce abstraction."