Günther Förg: passage

Nothing remains what it is

Some of the present watercolours were created on partially soiled sheets of paper. On sheets that had served as a base for painting other watercolours or that were within reach during this activity, so that the artist could dab his brush on them and check this or that valeur of a colour. Such working papers in the true sense of the word now became the basis for watercolours and paintings that range from cheerful-looking fields of stains to intense confrontations between different formal principles. The beginnings of this new "pictorial language", which were, as it were, formed out of themselves, naturally also thematise the phenomenon of the horror vacui, which ambiguously demands that on the one hand the emptiness, the pure white of the sheet should be done away with, while at the same time this task awakens fears that make any setting almost impossible. Perhaps it is even possible to draw a connection to French Impressionism, which in its search for the true visual realisation and depiction of the world was literally thrown back on the essence of the stain. For this stain is ultimately nothing other than the "tache" from which the Impressionist image of the world is built up as an extreme fragmentation of visible reality in painting, and in these paintings we can already see the contemporary response to this fragmentation of reality.

Exhibition:
Wagon weighbridge, Cologne, 25/3 - 22/4/2007