Günter Förg (born in 1952) creates complex installations from a blend of painting in various materials and media, combined with photography and sculpture. A salient note in his work is struck by his preoccupation with monochrome wallpainting which marked the biographical beginnings of his career as an artist. Bilder Paintings 1973–1990 presents his early paintings, among which are the yellow twelve-part series from the period around 1976 (the first of his monochrome series) and a thirty-two-part series from 1987. Both ensembles are executed in the technique of lead painting so characteristic of the artist’s work. This technique involves covering a wooden panel with sheet lead and coating it with acrylic paints. The particular effect and fascination of these pictures is attained by the interaction of the quick and fleeting application of the paint on the heavy, dull and mostly uneven lead surface, which draws attention to the materiality of the ground.

Förg perceives in his earlier grey paintings “a certain attitude of refusal”. When “colours emerge”, as he remarks in a conversation with Thomas Groetz reproduced here, “the paintings become more open”. The book sheds light on this process and on Förg’s return to monochrome paintings in the 1980s. The artist has built on the experience he gained in the meantime from wallpainting and now structures his painting surfaces more forcefully.

The thirty-two-part series he produced in 1987 marks the culmination of these pictorial compositions and is a demonstration of his complex compositional programme, an “alphabet” for formulating all manner of spatial arrangements. “In a way, abstract painting had become ‘real’ in relation both to its ingredients and to its presence tending towards an object”, writes Siegfried Gohr. In Förg’s work “... the material elements of the pictures themselves speak a language without words”.

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin