Günther Förg
Fussen (Germany), 1952

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.

Barcelona Pavillon I, 1988/1998

Förg’s work is symptomatic as a paradigm of a post modern attitude. It is situated on a crossroads of art disciplines that, to a certain extent, are meant to counterpoise Josep Beuys’ “expanded concept of Art”, for he admits that the field of dispersion does not refer to reality, but to the very realm of Art. In his work, painting, sculpture, bronze relief, mural painting and photography become a continuous system capable of binding itself together and utilising the uncertain differentiation between disciplines to provoke interferences, discourses that resound ideas under different forms.
When an artist such as Günter Förg deploys photography not as an end in itself but as an impartial means of commenting on the aims of art, something suffers in photography, something is left unsaid, as a misunderstanding, from the photographic perspective. I am referring, among other things, to the technical “imperfections”, that quality of hurried reportage, of disoriented paparazzi, contrasting with the highly structured work such as the photographic series documenting historic edifices of modern architecture. On the other hand, the technical imperfections –the entire history of photography is full of errors and surprises- resemble real sight, akin to the individual, to the passer-by, unlike the perfection of advertising. “I am not concerned, as are professional photographers, with focus or colour adjustment. My photos have a particular corporality that emerges from my way of composing them. When gazing at them, one feels a certain presence, something that never happens in a normal photograph”.
His work at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion is noteworthy due to the geometric clarity with which it attempts to synthesise with the architect’s constructive ideas, turning the elongated images into a continent in which the purity of line and direction of the construction is outstanding. Especially in Pavillon I, rather than on the spatial ambiance of the small building, Günter Förg’s vision is focused on describing certain significant details of the architecture in a rhetorical operation in which a part serves to represent the structure of the whole. F. J. S. M.

Barcelona Pavillon II, 1988/1998

In these images of the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, taken between 1988 and 1998, in other words, both before and after the restoration of the building that represented Germany in the 1929 World Fair in Barcelona, the height above the floor and the depth of the image are determined by a specific installation. In addition to the purely formal elements shaping this installation -large monochrome panels, the height of the ceiling, the dimensions of the space- this idea of installing monuments of the recent past has to do with an invitation to live it in the present, to bring it up to date through the effort of an artist who works as a medium with the past.
Despite their evident similarity, the two images of the Pavilion are radically different regarding image conception. In the earlier work Pavillion I, with an angle rendering the columns prominent stanchions, the entire image is filled with the dynamic dance of perspective, while this Pavillon II seems to offer a view of emptiness, the centre of the image located as it is in an uninhabited area. Despite this, when placed side by side, both images have the same compositional structure: a centre of gravity off to the right, where the forced perspective of the picture window quickly leads to the back of the image. The proportions of the ground, ceiling and wall are also similar, the line of pavement dividing the image in two.
In his small paintings of planes of colour, in his reckless and intense photographs of modern buildings and in his major installations of architectural colour and, although less blatantly, in his epidermal bronze reliefs, Günter Förg embraces a single theme: the coexistence of history’s disasters and the ever modernised splendour of art, the contrast -which he wishes to temper- between the ruins of modernity and the auto-regenerative capacity of artistic activity. The installations in which the artist juxtaposes large planes of colour alongside photographs of modern ruins do not tip the scale toward the melancholy mood, as perhaps they did in some of his shots of the restored Dessau Bauhaus, but instead they address a coexistence that is current, a salvation in renovated energy. F. J. S. M.