Günther Förg's work is an homage to color, an incessant attempt to bring out its own life and its almost infinite richness of variation through ever new combinations. His paintings almost effortlessly bring together the seemingly disparate on the canvas, combining elements of Concrete Art with gestural components: Geometric rigor meets expressive spontaneity, a calculated system meets the spontaneous intuition of the application of paint. Förg, whose paintings up into the 1980s were, if at all, based on rough construction sketches and had only a single layer of paint, described the intuitive-spontaneous process of creation of his works in an interview with Siegfried Gohr as follows: "There is, for example, no refuse in the paintings, also not in the lead paintings, because, if necessary, I make decisions very intuitively; for example, lets say I paint something in curry, but if it doesn't work at all, I’ll just put a violet next to it and save the picture." (G. Förg, quoted from: G. Förg in an interview with Siegfried Gohr, Cologne 1997, p. 41). Whether in his serial works, his grid paintings, lead paintings, or later large format works, Förg's painting happens in one go, the pictorial event must be realized in just one layer of painting. Again and again, Förg's painting seeks stylistic confrontation with other artists. In addition to influences from pre-war abstract modernism, Constructivism and Suprematism, the work of the early deceased Blinky Palermo was formative for the art student Förg in the 1970s. Later, American Action and Color Field Painting, such as the paintings of Willem de Kooning, Clifford Still, and Barnett Newman, became new sources of inspiration. Förg adapts and transforms what he sees, thus repeatedly harnessing new impulses in terms of color or form for his own multifaceted work. In the 1990s, Förg found decisive inspiration for the large-format grid paintings, of which our radiant composition is a prime example, in the grid-like or criss-cross linear structures in watercolors that Paul Klee had made since 1913. In these works, Klee took the decisive step towards a superimposition of linear, sign-like structures and a background of color fields. Since 1914, the cross has found its way into Klee's watercolors and, as in "Teppich der Erinnerung" (1914, Paul Klee Foundation, Bern), finally became the all-determining sign in front of a fund of abstract structures, for which the colorful carpets and wall hangings he had seen in Tunisia certainly provided decisive impulses. In Förg’s “Gitterbilder”, these art-historical impulses, which were so important for the development of abstract painting, are transformed and alienated by placing grid structures and luminous color surfaces next to one another rather than on top of one another, as Klee did, and staging them in a monumental format. Klee's works are small and graphic, while Förg's creations are monumental and painterly. In his famous grid paintings, Förg achieved an enormous color impact and strength, which he solely gained from the luminosity of the color and the contrast of surface and structure. In 2014, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, presented a first posthumous survey of the artist's work. This was followed in 2018 by the retrospective "Günther Förg. A Fragile Beauty," which was on view at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Förg's paintings are in numerous international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. [JS].