Gunther Forg Biography
Günther Förg (1952 - 2013) was born in 1952 in the Allgäu region of Germany. His career began in the early 1970s as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. During his studies, Förg developed a practice based almost exclusively on monochrome gray and black. These early investigations into grey, also called "Gitter" paintings, demonstrate the beginning of a lifelong commitment to conceptualism. The artist later incorporated color into his monochrome series, his use of gray representing a neutral base from which he conceived his work. In the 1980s, Förg began using photography, printing large-format images of culturally and politically significant architectural structures, from Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv to fascist constructions in Italy. This diversification of material and form led Förg to abandon painting altogether, and for some years he pursued a purely photographic practice as a reaction to painting itself. During the 1980s and 1990s, his photographic works achieved critical acclaim and were exhibited in major international museums, including the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY. Förg entered a new phase of experimentation in the late 1980s, which brought him back to painting, but also included the embrace of materials new to him, such as wood, copper, bronze and lead. Förg begins to turn to sculptural practice producing sculptures of fragmented body parts in the early 1990s, describing this arrival at figuration as inevitable. Since the late 2000s, Förg's painting has taken a brighter and gestural turn, resulting from an intuitive approach to color and composition.
