Förg's painting is a spontaneous and free expression of his commitment to structure and flow. Only a few of his paintings are prepared with rough construction sketches, as he usually creates his works directly on the painting surface in one or at most two steps. Förg's paintings are meant to turn out successfully in one fell swoop, the pictorial idea must be realized vigorously and with strong dynamics in one go. His painting is always closely interwoven with art-historical traditions in which it finds artistic impulses, and his painterly examination of his models enters into a dialog that transcends epochs and styles. The influences of abstract Pre-War Modernism, Constructivism and Suprematism, and the unique creations of Edward Munch and Paul Klee are of central importance. In addition, progressive tendencies found in the oeuvre of the early deceased Blinky Palermo and the calligraphic painting of the American Cy Twobley also played a formative role for the art student Förg in the 1970s. Later, American Action and Color Field Painting became a rich source of inspiration. Förg adapted and transformed what he saw and thus always drew on new impulses for his multifaceted work. In our large-format work "Untitled" (1998), Förg confidently plays with the art-historical tradition of grid paintings that go back as far as Paul Klee and combines this formal structure with his gestural application of paint and the color palette of his famous gray paintings. During his time at the academy in the 1970s, Förg began to paint gray pictures on a weekly basis, in which he applied black paint to a primed canvas, mixing it with a sponge to create a gray structure. "The pictures were created as if on a chalkboard. After all, a similarity remained. That's how I worked right from the start, which seems a bit strange in retrospect. You come to the academy and find yourself faced with a certain freedom [..] and then I immediately put myself in a kind of bondage by painting a gray picture every week." (G. Förg, quoted from: Kunst Heute no. 18, Cologne 1997, p. 20) In the 1980s, Förg structured some of these gray paintings with wiped, almost monochrome grid structures before he finally began, as is the case in the present work, to spread fine graphic grid structures over the soft gray background of the surface in a kind of "ecriture automatique". In its graphic style and reduced choice of colors, "Untitled (1998)" shows the influence of Cy Twombly's gray paintings, while the grid-like structures seem to take up elements of Edward Munch's unleashed style of painting and drawing. Förg's painting, "Untitled" (1998) emanates an almost meditative aloofness and tranquillity, despite the highly dynamic grid structures set in charcoal against the painting ground, has conveyed all of these art-historical references into the present as a powerful reinterpretation achieved through the artistic principles of adaptation, combination and alienation.
In 2014, the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, presented a first posthumous retrospective of the artist's work. This was followed in 2018 by the retrospective “Günther Förg. A Fragile Beauty” at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Förg's paintings can be found in numerous international museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. [JS]