Exhibition

Fondation Le Corbusier and Almine Rech are pleased to present Le moderne, Günther Förg’s solo exhibition at Maison La Roche in Paris, on view from October 15 to December 14, 2024.

Günther Förg, born in 1952 in Allgäu, Germany, began his artistic career in the early 1970s at The Academy of Fine Art Munich where he was influenced by Blinky Palermo. Förg initially focused on grey and black monochrome paintings, which laid the groundwork for his lifelong commitment to conceptualism. He viewed grey as a neutral base, neither white nor black, free from the constraints of figuration. After his early monochromatic paintings, Förg continued to explore modernist themes from postmodern perspectives. Despite his exploration of various media, including sculpture, ceramics, and photography, painting remained his most important expressive medium. His extensive body of work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Ville de Paris, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

In the 1980s, Förg expanded his practice to large-format photography, capturing culturally and politically significant architectural structures from Tel Aviv to Moscow. This period marked a temporary departure from painting, as he explored photography as a closer representation of reality. His photographic works gained international acclaim, exhibited in major museums like Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Förg returned to painting in the late 1980s, incorporating new materials such as wood, copper, bronze, and lead. His lead series, with acrylic on sheets of lead supported by wooden frames, blurred the line between painting and sculpture. His bronze sculptures from this period also displayed a painterly quality, with textures reminiscent of brushstrokes.

By the 21st century, Förg’s paintings evolved beyond Minimalism, featuring a brighter palette and expressive marks. His mastery of color to create space and form opened new insights in his painting. Works from this era, such as the Gitterbilder (grid paintings), showcased vibrant colors and gestural hatching, drawing comparisons to Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, and Paul Klee. Förg’s later works appropriated older strategies of picture-making, presenting them afresh and indicating a synthesis of his experimental journey, rooted in art history. As he put it, ‘painting is a resilient practice; it remains ever-present and unchanging through history.’