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He received his education at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, attending K.F. Dahmen's classes. He lives in Cologne and Munich. Günther Förg celebrated his first exhibition along with another five classmates at the Academie in Munich, and since then he has held numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums all over the world, especially in Germany. He belongs to the generation of photographers who explore landscape from varying viewpoints: Förg, coming from a pictorial tradition, focuses his analysis on architecture.

He deploys photography, painting, sculpture and environmental installations, entrusting the photographic medium to reproduce social sheres by representing reproductions of architecture pertaining to the tradition of the modern European movement. The space Förg addresses is not an abstraction, but the very ambiance of life that art sets out to organise rationally.

Simultaneously traditional and contemporary, Günter Förg's painting embodies a commentary on the German geometric abstraction of the 1950s as well as the American minimalism from the previous decade. His monochromatic planes of colour recreate with extraordinary subtlety the colour palettes of American artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

Amongst the entire "new objectivity" group in Germany, Günther Förg is the artist furthest from the postulates of a cold and dispassionate vision. His work embraces several artistic genres, from the large, usually unfocused images of modern buildings, such as Asilo d'Infanzia Sant'Elia, in Como, or the Villa Wittgenstein, in Vienna, in which he reflects on the passage of time and the demise of the ideals of modernity; the large-scale close-up portraits of women, such as Renate or Eve, in which the characteristic coldness of Becher's students becomes a warm proximity with the subject; to the Wandmalerei, large monochrome murals in which he draws on the modern muralist tradition, the small paintings of lively and defined plains of colour, in bronze as well as wood and canvas, in which he comments on the geometric abstraction produced between World Wars; or the Bronzereliefs, nudes in which the unequal vestige of the artist's hand is all that is perceived. Along with many of his peers, such as Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer and Axel Hutte, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, Günter Förg is one of the most widely recognised German artists in the international art scene. Within the context of German photography, Günter Förg is an expressionist, an artist employing the camera in order to make us think and share, even suffer and cry, with the inert surfaces of the buildings that have administered a fleeting example of beauty.

Furthermore, as opposed to the most consecrating or critical aspects of Candida Höfer's interiors, or the expressive anaesthesia of Thomas Ruff's housing projects, Günter Förg's images exemplify a melancholic shift, employing photography as a recovery from the past. F. J. S. M.