Günther Förg: Felder – Ränder

Fearless Förg ...

writes Rudi Fuchs and continues: "There is a certain chronology in Günther Förg's work: when he used a certain strategy for the first time, and what followed. But it has little meaning in view of his working method. Mondrian, it seems, made one variation after another in his abstract phase, each time more precise than the last. There is the idea of progress in his art. Günther Förg, on the other hand, goes round in circles. So there is no reason why a particular design should not be used again. With each new application of a design, new effects will emerge, which will enter his ever-growing repertoire as artistic knowledge. For example, consider the following design: painted grids of very short, intersecting lines. The grids can be loose or compact, richly coloured or sparse. Finally, you can also vary the length of the lines or combine fragments of different grids loosely and at random to create a kind of collage. In the recent exhibition in Zurich, I also saw a painting with a very dense grid in flaming red, more luminous than I had ever seen before. Another new invention: apparently the grid method is inexhaustible in the relaxed way Günther Förg uses it. He is an adventurer. The early abstract masters had the urge to control their practice. They were very circumspect, Mondrian and Malevich. We know from their writings the extent to which they saw their art as spiritual. They needed that sense of affirmation. Schwitters and Mirò were less principled, but still carried the philosophical peculiarity of making abstract art as a responsibility. Günther Förg is not concerned with any of these obstacles. This is why, in his laconic design of pictorial constructions, he is able to unfold and realise the entire spectrum of visual richness that only abstract art can offer. After a long career of geometric art, his great colleague Sol Lewitt began to produce colourful drawings with sweeping, undulating lines. A violation of the principle? That was what some critics thought: Sol had gone astray. Why, they asked? Sol was silent for a moment and then said: Why not? Indeed. At this point, also in Günther Förg's work, abstract art, the grandiose modern invention, has arrived - at the comprehensive, unrestricted, fearless handling of all its ways and means."