Günther Förg

Günther Förg's career began in the early 1970s as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. During his studies he worked almost exclusively with monochrome grey and black tones. These early explorations show the beginning of a lifelong devotion to Conceptualism. Förg experimented with painting, photography and sculpture as well as with different materials. In his later works, the artist also incorporated a lighter, more colourful palette as well as a series of grid-like, gestural hatchings. These so-called "grid paintings", with seemingly hastily placed brushstrokes and surfaces in broken colours, captivate with a special freedom of form and sensuality.

Förg's artistic work is an experimentation with colours and forms, materials and media, with contents and statements, with figuration and abstraction. His work resists attempts at fixed categorisation. It is an ongoing search and exploration.

Günther Förg taught painting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe from 1992 to 1998 and held a professorship for painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1999 until his death.

His works are represented in major museums, including Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum der Gegenwart, Berlin; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; MoMA, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London.

Günther Förg (born 1952 in Füssen) died in 2013 in Freiburg.