Günther Förg

These untitled paintings by Günther Förg (b. 1952, Füssen – d. 2013, Freiburg) belong to a series dating from the mid 1980’s for which the artist worked in acrylics on sheets of lead wrapped over wood. From 1984 to 1992, Förg produced these works on an almost daily basis, sometimes making twenty or thirty paintings at one time. Of uniform shape and size, they are characteristic of the artist’s pragmatic approach to painting. Working without a studio until the late 1980’s, they were often produced at the galleries where they were exhibited or on the premises of the transport company that shipped them once dry. Förg’s Bleibilder (lead paintings) have an in-built seriality based on the repetition of certain compositional elements. Applying strategies from conceptual art, they knowingly confront the challenges of working in this traditional medium, playfully adopting the principles of mass-production whilst also affirming the object’s unique and impractical materiality, here by painting on one of the densest metals available, lead.