Background
Förg was born in Füssen, Bavaria, Germany, on December 5, 1952. He was the son of Michael Förg, who worked in a customs office.
2012
Günther Förg with his work.
Portrait of Günther Förg.
Akademiestraße 2-4, 80799 Munich, Germany
Günther Förg studied under the direction of Karl Fred Dahmen at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1973 until 1979.
Günther Förg posing in front of his painting.
Günther Förg. Photo by Franziska von Messner-Rast.
artist educator Photographer sculptor
Förg was born in Füssen, Bavaria, Germany, on December 5, 1952. He was the son of Michael Förg, who worked in a customs office.
Günther Förg studied under the direction of Karl Fred Dahmen at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1973 until 1979.
Förg's artistic oeuvre included paintings, graphic and sculptural artworks as well as a plenty of architectural photographs. The artist combined materials and media in painting, sculpture and photography. The main motif of these photos was Bauhaus and fascist aesthetics. Some of the artists that greatly influenced Günther Förg’s abstract style were Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly.
Between 1973 and 1976, Günther Förg painted almost exclusively black monochrome paintings in acrylic. In 1977, after the death of his artistic colleague, Blinky Palermo, Förg turned to minimal art. This phase was followed by some of his prominent works in the early 1980s. Förg had his first solo exhibition at Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery, Munich, in 1980 with a series of monochrome paintings.
In the early 1980s, Förg created his so-called Alubilder, assemblages of aluminium sheeting onto which he had painted linear patterns or portrait photographs. For his series of paintings on lead, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, Günther Förg wrapped lead sheets over wood and then painted each surface with acrylic.
Förg started to use photography for his art, mostly large formats of a variety of famous architectural sites, at the beginning of the 1980s. In the area of photography, he is known for his artworks from 1980-2006, where he used such architectural sites as the Wittgenstein House, Casa del Fascio, Casa Malaparte, and Hans Poelzig’s IG Farben Building in Frankfurt.
His interest in photography led him to travel a lot around Europe, visiting Austria, Russia, Spain, France, Turkey, Israel, and Italy where he primarily photographed Bauhaus buildings. Förg's photographic research presented the uncompromisingly modern architecture in an unembellished way. The grainy quality of his photographs conveyed his preoccupation in the process of fragmentation making it a modern style. This effect was applied to suggest a similarity with paintings. His sharp-angled perspectives on some of the Bauhaus structures served to suggest the nature of those buildings. Many of the photographs were taken through windows that drew attention to transitions from interior to exterior space.
In 1988, as part of the Sculpture in the City exhibition, Günther Förg installed two-metre-long walls of mirrors in a Rotterdam tube station; however, they were demolished in 1999. In 1991 for the inauguration of Frankfurt's Museum für Moderne Kunst, Förg produced a colourful wall piece for the central stairway, which together with a bronze relief formed a contrast to the architectural structure of the post-modern museum architecture. In 1992 paintings and works on paper, known as "Gitterbilder" (grid paintings), appeared in his artworks.
In 1992, his art pieces were displayed at the documenta IX, which was followed by an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1995.
In addition to his artistic career, Förg taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe (the present-day Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design) from 1992 until 1999. From 1999, he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He had a home in Areuse, Switzerland, as well as in Freiburg.
In 2000, he was commissioned to design Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue in Zurich. For this project, Günther Förg handled the colour design for all of the interiors in the 1920s Villa Bodmer as well as installed two enormous tubes of raw metal in its central entrance hall.
Later on, Günther Förg held solo exhibitions at Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria, Museum der Stadt Füssen, Füssen, Germany, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria, and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany.
Untitled (04.B.0122)
Untitled (Cansons)
Untitled (10/90)
Untitled I
Genter Serie
Untitled (04.B.0111)
Untitled (04.B.0101)
Alba
Pariser Serie
Untitled
Untitled
Untitled 1 and 2
Heliogravuren zu den Documenta Bildern
Untitled (05.B.0098)
Untitled in 8 Parts
Kasseler Serie
Untitled (blue)
Untitled (Gitterbild)
Untitled III
Untitled (in 5 parts)
Campo 2
Untitled II
Untitled (08.B.0032)
Untitled
Untitled (No. 12 and 13)
Composition bleue et verte
Capri
Untitled
Città universitaria Roma
Untitled (Black and Orange)
Untitled
Untitled (Cansons)
Untitled (brown/violet)
Bad Honnef Multiple
Untitled I
Untitled
Untitled (farbfeld)
Vertigo
Quotations: "I like very much the qualities of lead - the surface, the heaviness. Some of the paintings were completely painted, and you only experience the lead at the edges; this gives the painting a very heavy feeling - it gives the colour a different density and weight."
Förg married Ika Huber in 1993.