Günther Förg

A renowned German contemporary artist, Günther Förg explores the legacy of Modernism in his paintings, sculptures, and photography. Along with his contemporaries Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Förg came of age in the postwar era, when Modernist aesthetics had become tainted by the memory of fascism. His art, like theirs, is marked by an attempt to create a vital new iconography for the contemporary era while simultaneously reflecting on the horrors of the past.

For instance, Förg's large-format architectural photographs of new German buildings—usually taken from below—highlight the imposing austerity of their design. By photographing buildings with unsavory histories, like the IG Farben Nazi research building in Frankfurt or Marcello Piacentini's university campus commissioned by Mussolini, Förg draws an uncomfortable comparison between the avant-garde's utopian ideals and fascism's brutal ideology.

Förg's anachronistic paintings, meanwhile, are also steeped in the fraught history of Modernism. He large, commanding canvases run the gamut from the geometrical rationalism of Piet Mondrian to the spiritual color fields of Barnett Newman and Marc Rothko. Equal parts parody and homage, Förg's paintings provide a skeptical glance back at the Modern idea of the sublime. Förg has had numerous solo exhibitions including those at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.