Untitled

‘Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you..’
—TED HUGHES, RED, 1988

A monumental hatched net of blood-red horizontal and vertical lines, Günther Förg’s Untitled (2006) possesses an architectural grandeur and forcefulness that seems to physically surround the viewer in its huge scale and intoxicating colour and depth. A magnificent example of Förg’s Gitterbilder, or ‘grid paintings’, the work is an exuberant variation on the theme; packed densely together, the intersecting lines of the grid seem to generate a vivid cloud of red that hangs in the centre of the painting, producing a vast sense of depth that reacts against the bands of white primer left at the painting’s top and bottom. However, although other Förg grids from this period maintain bright grounds of pure white around their lines, here, the primer is speckled with subtler marks of grey, green and blue – marks that initially seem accidental, but that on closer inspection possess their own depth, serving to further draw out the sublime luminosity of the central grid itself.

In building these interacting fields of depth while achieving such a vigorousness of line and brilliancy of colour, Förg’s work reflects conceptual principles that historically underpinned his art – a formal purism, the sense of the artwork as object, and an architectural interest in space, both real and illusory. Förg is on the one hand interested in reminding us of the work’s objective existence; the marks of paint circling the work draw attention to the process of its own painting, reminding us of its physical reality as a worked object and artefact. However this physicality is contrasted with the way in which the painting elsewhere explores the ambiguous space of the canvas, the sheer visual allure of the grid drawing us into illusion. The grid envelops the viewer in the fabric of its lines, hovering in the picture with a strange, gravity-defying density and weight, while the translucent quality of its perpendicular lines suggest something behind, but fail to reveal it. In this richly sensorial treatment of forms and marks, Untitled transports us between the imagined spaces of painting, and the real, corporeal presence of an artwork as it exists in the flesh.