Colorful veils of color in varying densities float across the unfilled expanses of Günther Förg’s Untitled. Painted in 2010, the present work is emblematic of the artist’s late work, completed in the final year of his celebrated career. While an elegant and experimental departure from the structured constructions of his earlier color blocks, Untitled is comprised of the same gestural brushstrokes and loose scrawls of pigment that are characteristic of Förg’s trademark painterly style. In Untitled, Förg masterfully employs negative space to unify and establish harmonies between the disparate passages of color, imbuing the work with a graceful atmospheric lightness.
Though Förg experimented with the behavior of color throughout his career, later works belonging to his Spot Paintings series and those that followed, such as Untitled, examine color by freeing it from the confinements of line and definite shape. By eliminating edges and refusing to determine boundaries within the painting, Förg frees the colors to interact and influence one another, intuitively positioning each form by hue rather than allowing its placement to be dictated by spatial boundaries imposed by line. Untitled furthers Förg’s lifelong test of the capabilities of color and form as delicately rendered fields of pigment hover in relation to one another and to the teeming breadth of negative space.
While an archetypal example of a pioneering artist’s most endeavoring interrogations of painting, Untitled gleefully engages with the legacies of Hard-edge painting and modernist color theory. Förg recontextualizes formalist concerns belonging to the annals of modernism, successfully reimagining the spatial relationships of color in a way that is undeniably contemporary. Untitled demonstrates the artist’s unique ability to create abstract dialogues between the carefully arranged forms of his painting, allowing each color to take on a life of its own
Provenance
Estate Günther Förg, Suisse
Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in December 2017Exhibited
Frankfurt, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Günther Förg, February 16–March 13, 2010
Property from an Important Private Collection, Florida
366
Untitled
signed, inscribed and dated "Förg 2010 3" on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
77 x 82 3/4 in. (195.6 x 210.2 cm)
Painted in 2010, this work is recorded in the archive of Günther Förg as no. WVF.10.B.0001-3.
We thank Mr. Michael Neff from the Estate of Günther Förg for the information he has kindly provided on this work.
Estimate
$350,000 - 500,000
Sold for $693,000
Rebekah Bowling
Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York
1 212 940 1250
rbowling@phillips.com
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York Auction 24 June 2021
322
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367
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399
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406
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409
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470
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479
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