Günther Förg / Günter Herburger: Die Trilogie der Tatzen

Meet up with Valentin

Following the volume "Watercolours" with Arnold Stadler, Günther Förg invited Günter Herburger, another literary voice, to accompany him and his work in 2008. Here, however, the process was different: while Stadler's inimitable text, which brought together fragments and splinters of thought from the context of his new novel "Komm, gehen wir", was aimed at Günther Förg's watercolours, Günter Herburger gave an outline of the places and phases of the artist's life in a small trilogy, to which the artist responded with a series of monotypes. The special attraction for Günther Förg was that Herburger based his three texts on picture stories that wanted to call out to the viewer "everything has been there before". The result was a dialogue project between the disciplines, the like of which had not been seen in recent years. Günter Herburger is best known as an author for his novel "Die Messe" (1969) and the prose volume "Die Eroberung der Zitadelle" (1972). His "Thuja" trilogy (1977-1991) was praised for its "illusionless social criticism and sometimes almost Valentinean lunacy", and Günter Herburger became popular with his children's books "Birne kann alles" (1971) and "Birne brennt durch" (1975).