11 3/8 x 8 1/4 in
Günther Förg was born in Füssen, Germany, in 1952. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where his early practice developed around monochrome painting, particularly in grey and black. From the beginning, Förg’s work was marked by a sustained reflection on the history of modernism, architecture, materiality and the limits of pictorial space.
During the 1980s, Förg expanded his practice to photography, producing large-scale images of modernist and politically charged architecture, including Bauhaus buildings and structures from the fascist period in Italy. At the same time, he began to explore the exhibition space itself, placing photographs in dialogue with painting and occasionally working directly on gallery walls. This cross-disciplinary approach became central to his practice, allowing him to move between image, object, surface and site.
Förg is widely known for his lead paintings, in which sheets of lead mounted on wooden supports are painted with acrylic. These works blur the boundary between painting and sculpture, emphasising the physical presence of the support while retaining a strong painterly sensibility. Later, his work became increasingly gestural, particularly in the grid and dot paintings of the 1990s and 2000s, where structure and expression coexist in a deliberately unstable balance.
His practice remains one of the most important late twentieth-century investigations into the legacy of modernism. Förg’s work resists stylistic categorisation, moving between Minimalism, abstraction, architecture, photography and expressive mark-making, while continually returning to painting as a resilient and contemporary medium.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Bern; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. His works are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Bonn; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Günther Förg died in Freiburg in 2013.