Günther Förg uses the language of abstraction employed by American artists such as Barnett Newman and Frank Stella as well as German artists such as Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel, but uses it in a contradictory, often surprising fashion that is mindful of the failings of modernist theories of painting. Curator Paul Schimmel once said of Förg’s art that it brings “sense of nothing but the thing itself,” meaning that the work empties abstract painting of its spiritual, timeless, and mystical qualities in favor of a style more in tune with minimalism’s concrete, material nature. Materials are very important to Förg, and his paintings and sculptures are often exercises in purely formal concerns. For example, he will use bronze, a material for permanent, epic sculpture, and fill its surface with fingerprints, chance circumstances, and material accidents that contradict its historically received nature.

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