Günther Förg

In the exhibition at Galerie Thomas, works from three decades provide a good insight into Günther Förg's painterly work. Abstract and geometric, but at the same time gestural, expressive and spontaneous, Förg explores the possibilities and conditions of painting through the variation of surfaces, materials and colour contrasts - paintings which not only want to be looked at, but also have a shaping effect on perception.

Günther Förg's oeuvre is marked by a pictorial language that encompasses several materials and media, focussing mainly on the relation to space. Since the late 1970s, he developed this language in the fields of photography, painting, sculpture and installations. With his material-accentuating, abstract style of painting that often manifested itself in black and grey monochrome works, Förg also unlocked the potential of lead and aluminium as new painting substrates. In the 1990s, he created large-format, coloured window and grid pictures as well as works in the tradition of Colour Field Painting, but always in the context of exploring and reinterpreting spaces. In his photographic series, he dealt with buildings that shaped the 20th century history of architecture. Yet here, too, the relation to space remained important and inspired Förg to further explore architectural structures and construction elements, outside of their context, from an artistic viewpoint. Förg's works were exhibited at documenta IX in 1992. He became a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1999.