“I like very much the qualities of lead - the surface, the heaviness […] It already has a presence.” 1997
Untitled, from 1992 is an outstanding example of Günther Förg’s lead panel based works. Förg was fascinated by the ability of his physical tools to express their materiality within his painted images. By diluting his acrylic paint, his brush strokes become smoothed fluid lines across the panel whose natural texture and intrinsic qualities are as readily apparent as the texture of the brush stroke. Bifurcating the panel into two halves, a deep forest green to the right and a lush burnt umber to the left, Förg reveals the paradoxes of his own painting in its perceptible materiality and form as well as through its chromatic scheme and composition. The inconsistencies and irregularities of the lead provide the stage on which Förg explores and disseminates his study of color and the material with which it interacts. The lead, toxic and seemingly hard by nature, is malleable and soft to the touch. The irregularities and inconsistencies of the lead provide a challenge to Förg that he embraces wholeheartedly – the panel becomes a stage on which he is able to explore the potential of painting.
Günther Förg’s practice was predicated on the adventure and exploration of the artist throughout his or her own imagination and how those ideas and conceits could be continuously translated into a visual exploration. No longer encumbered by the rigidity of principles or a particular “school” Förg was free to examine the nature of painting without the philosophical encumbrances of his forbears. He spent his entire career exploring many of the same material and aesthetic issues which plagued the earlier abstractionists, but from a particularly post-modern perspective. Working with the visual knowledge and intellectual understanding of artists like Robert Ryman and Ellsworth Kelly, Förg was able to continue their investigations of painting in a wholly new fashion.
