Günther Förg’s unerring instinct
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In 2007 Erich Gantzert-Castrillo, renowned art restorer and founder of Artemak (Archiv für Techniken und Arbeitsmaterialien Zeitgenössischer Künstler), has a long conversation with Günther Förg. Förg is then 54 years old. The conversation is fully protocolled and can be found on the internet. It offers so much insight into Förg’s views and working methods that we quote from it generously. In addition, in this newsletter, painter Max Dax and art historian Veit Loers are given the floor.
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Quirky and arrogant
Günther Förg was born in Füssen, South Germany, as the son of a customs officer. From 1973 to 1979 he studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. He is taught by painter Karl Fred Dahmen, who recognizes his talent and supports him. By his own account, Förg has a bad relationship with his fellow students. He would be unpopular because of his quirkiness and arrogance.
In the early days of his academy Förg makes monochromes, mainly gray over black on a lead support. Later he also starts painting on wood and nettle cloth. Gantzert-Castrillo records from Förg’s mouth a telling anecdote from his academy days. A friend of Karl Fred Dahmen, painter Erwin Bechtold, wanted to buy a painting from student Förg. “The following day, Dahmen asked me in class, ‘How much does that cost?’ I also didn’t know what a painting should cost. So I yelled: 10,000 DM. Dahmen, of course, was flabbergasted, and yelled at me: ‘What?’ I replied: 10,000 DM. Dahmen replied in his Rhenish accent: ‘Kid, you’re raving!’ I then said: ‘No, that costs 10,000 DM anyway.’” The end of the song, of course, was that Bechtold didn’t buy the painting. “Die Klasse hat mich gehasst,” adds Förg (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 3-4). According to Förg, none of his class continued to paint: “Die Leute haben alle den Pinsel geschmissen” (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 3).
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Günther Förg, Fläche – Streifen, 1985
Etching and aquatint, 68.3 x 50 cm (sheet), 49.9 x 39.5 cm (image)
Collection Olla Art
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A real blast
After a few years at the academy, Förg becomes demotivated. He then does nothing for a while, except, in his own words, playing table tennis and chess. Even after leaving the academy in 1979, until the early eighties, he practically no longer paints, but does take up photography. Around 1984 he picks up the brush again. He soon achieves success with his paintings on lead.
About this breakthrough, Förg says in the interview with Gantzert-Castrillo: “It was a real blast at the time. I mean – I couldn’t paint that fast or it was ripped out of my hands. And from one point on, just about all the stuff I made was shipped straight to America. I practically overloaded America with lead” (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 6).
Förg says that at a certain point, around 1988, he flew back and forth between Neuchâtel, where he had a studio, and Basel, to make his paintings at Möbeltrans, an international shipping company. The shipping company was happy with this, because it allowed them to immediately transport the paintings to America. Until Förg gets tired of it himself: “Und dann sagte ich mir, irgendwas musst du ändern,” in his own words (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 7). He radically breaks with work on lead as a support, and switches to canvas. As a renowned artist, however, he finds that he can no longer work on that ‘thin, shabby nettle cloth’ from his academy days. But he also doesn’t want to switch to linen, because that seems too conventional to him (“zu kunstverdächtig”). He opts for cotton duck as an intermediate form.
With the switch to cloth as a support, Förg’s income drops drastically, because – he says – art lovers are conservative and always want what you did before. However, in the long run, the work on cloth also starts to run and therefore pays off. In addition, from 1986 onwards, Förg starts to make sculptures, initially bronze reliefs. He is also successful with this.
The idea of declination
In ArtDaily, painter Max Dax, in an article on the occasion of a Förg exhibition in the Almine Rech Gallery in London in 2015, elaborates on the character of Förg’s work. He calls the early lead paintings exemplary of Förg’s resolute decision in favour of declination, “not least because they are so accessible and mark Förg’s breakthrough in the USA”. More specifically about the paintings displayed at the Almine Rech Gallery, Dax says: “They are based on a small watercolour by Paul Klee from the 1930s, which Förg, in an act of painting about painting, has blown up to monumental size.” Dax recalls that Förg had a considerable collection of art books in various places: “Presumably, it was in one of his libraries that his attention was drawn to Klee’s watercolour, prompting him to transform his initial urge to make something based on this work into these autonomous paintings, which can all but dispense with the reference to their model” (Dax, 2015).
In this context, Dax quotes painter and graphic designer Max Wechsler, who, in an article about Förg’s work, pointedly noted: “Everything seems more or less clearly to derive from something, everything seems to claim that artistic work should fundamentally also be understood as a continuous, commenting reaction on existing pictorial works – including, naturally, one’s own” (Wechsler, 1996).
The series of paintings displayed in the Almine Rech Gallery made an impact as a whole, Dax continues. “And because the idea of declination implies that no individual painting can make an impact on its own, only their common existence as a presumably endless series (albeit disseminated over the four corners of the globe) can create the polyphony of expression inherent in Förg’s work.”
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Günther Förg, untitled, 1994
Lithograph, 65 x 50 cm (sheet), 63 x 47 cm (image)
Collection Olla Art
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Diversity
In his interview Gantzert-Castrillo reviews the various supports and materials with which Förg has worked since his academy days. Förg has painted on lead, on copper, on wood, on masonite, all this in various sizes, from small to monumental. His mirrors, his bronze reliefs, his wall paintings are discussed. The American artist Robert Ryman has been an important source of inspiration for this diversity, Förg points out. Already during his time at the academy, the young Förg read a catalogue text about Ryman to the class by way of presentation. Experimenting with different surfaces, different materials and techniques is something Ryman also propagated and put into practice. Commenting on Gantzert-Castrillo that Förg often drastically stopped using a certain medium or working with a certain technique, he himself says: “As you get older, you close one thing after another” (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 9).
Not that slick
Throughout his career, Förg has mainly painted with acrylics. In the interview he states that the main reason for this is that acrylic is easier to process; the drying time is much shorter than of oil paint. But he is ambivalent about that. He puts it this way to Gantzert-Castrillo: “I always think to myself that when I get older, I should start painting with oil paint. I’m a little afraid of that. But I think it should be doable. Oil has a better quality than acrylic.” And: “The nice thing is that it doesn't look that slick, because I can draw a tight line, which I always did as a house painter, but if it wobbles a little, it takes on authenticity, something original” (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 9).
Förg states he often tells his students about that avoidance of slickness: “Leave a drip. There is then no longer any discussion whether it is painting. […] Students then look at me wide-eyed and think: ‘Is it that simple?’ I say: ‘It is that simple.’ If you have to think long and hard about painting, it becomes difficult. Sometimes I am working on a painting and have a problem with it. I then step back, look at it and then just grab a colour blue and put on blue. I’m not thinking about using blue. Instead, I instinctively reach for that colour. That’s the quality. If you think about it for a long time, it gets cramped” (Gantzert-Castrillo, 2007, I, p. 12).
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Günther Förg, Baum, 2003
Etching with watercolour, 99.6 x 74.7 cm (sheet), 79.1 x 58.8 cm (image)
Collection Olla Art
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Apollinian versus Dionysian
In an in memoriam on the occasion of Förg’s early death (he died of cancer on the day he would have turned 61) in Artforum, former museum director and art historian Veit Loers makes a case for Förg, whom he knew personally, and his work. “Some critics and artists maligned his work as haphazard, protesting that he was producing altogether too much, but he knew exactly what he was doing. Call it the Apollonian versus the Dionysian: the discourse of a rational and contemporary perspective on abstract painting, combined with a world of mysterious and enigmatic depth, roiled by memories and the powerful and immediate allure of painting. In his unerring instinct for colours and proportions, he easily eclipsed the painters of his generation” (Loers, 2014).
Real asshole
Loers sketches divergent images of the person Förg. He could be, in Loers’ words, a ‘real asshole’. “He’d come to openings to pick fights with certain people, calling art ‘disgusting’, women ‘sluts’, and men ‘faggots’. He’d drink too much red wine, upsetting glasses and making a mess, crawling beneath dinner tables or clambering atop them, and later he’d fall asleep in a chair. During the day, however, he was gracious and exceptionally generous; he knew a great deal about painting and its techniques, about architecture and literature. In the 1980s, he got on some people’s bad side by allegedly expressing right-wing extremist views. I was with him at a bar in Kassel in 1990 when he stood on a table to sing the ‘Internationale’ – on the eve of German reunification, that was an expression of his deeply rooted personal anarchy. The Günther Förg I mourn has left us a magnificent oeuvre, shrouded in melancholy and driven by an overarching idea that many of us have yet to understand” (Loers, 2014).
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References
Dax, M. (2015). Almine Rech Gallery in London presents six paintings by Günther Förg. ArtDaily, 4 June 2015. Available at: https://artdaily.cc/news/79039/Almine-Rech-Gallery-in-London-presents-six-paintings-by-G-nther-F-ouml-rg (Accessed: 12 September 2022).
Gantzert-Castrillo, E. (2007). Interview mit Günther Förg zum malerischen Werk (Teil 1), geführt von Erich Gantzert-Castrillo, 12.11.2007. Transcript. Available at: https://artemak.art/artist/guenther-foerg/interview-mit-guenther-foerg-zum-malerischen-werk-teil-2 (Accessed: 12 September 2022).
Gantzert-Castrillo, E. (2007). Interview mit Günther Förg zum malerischen Werk (Teil 2), geführt von Erich Gantzert-Castrillo, 12.11.2007. Transcript. Available at: https://artemak.art/artist/guenther-foerg/interview-mit-guenther-foerg-zum-malerischen-werk-teil-2 (Accessed: 12 September 2022).
Loers, V. (2014). Passages. Günther Förg (1952–2013). Artforum, 9 May 2014. Available at: https://www.artforum.com/passages/veit-loers-on-guenther-foerg-1952-2013-46690 (Accessed: 12 September 2022).
Wechsler, M. (1996). Ein komplexes Schau-spiel, inszeniert auch im Detail: Zur Kunst von Günther Förg. In: Günther Förg, exhibition catalogue Kunstverein Hannover.
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