Günther Förg at Greene Naftali

Günther Förg’s reputation has been in hibernation in New York City. Förg, who came to prominence in Germany in the late seventies and the 1980s along with Blinky Polermo and Albert Oehlen, has not had a one person exhibition in this city in almost twelve years, and that show was not well received. Writing about that exhibition at Luhring Augustine in 2000, Ken Johnson notes, “There is an empty, generic quality to these pictures… [That] might constitute a retrospective essay on the passing of heroic Modernism… Mr. Forg's paintings, though theatrically imposing, are devoid of visual or sensual appeal... [That] depends on the academically programmed viewer's working to get more out of his art than he seems to put into it.”  Förg’s new paintings at Greene Naftali appears to have the same inert and affectless tone as his work from the previous decade. Similar to his earlier work, Förg’s new paintings rely upon Modernist notions of minimalist composition and abstraction. Consisting of two sets of paintings, both made from 2007-2009, that use opposite chromatic intensities to make similar points. The first group consists of brightly colored graffiti clusters, while the second, smaller, group of four paintings is mural-sized grey monochromes. While ostensibly painted by hand, the ‘bright’ paintings have a decal-like flatness to them that appear laminated onto the canvas. The grey monochromes, however, rely on a feathery touch that hovers around the edges of the composition. Förg’s paintings in this exhibition are indeed dispirited, but for strategic reasons, not necessarily for deficits of intention. Born in 1952, three years after Germany was divided into a Western and Eastern Bloc, Förg lived in the curdled after effects of the Modernist Utopian experiment. German painting, of which Förg is an important ‘second-generation’ member, has skepticism tattooed in its marrow. Emotion plays a part of Forg’s practice, albeit in passive form. Not hot and heavy, Förg’s abstraction is coy, allusive and edging towards the moribund.

Aller Retour (2008)