Günther Förg at Fondation Beyeler on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Nov 27 2009
until Feb 28 2010
An exhibition project by Günther Förg (b. 1952), consisting of murals and twenty-one photographs. Günther Förg lives and works in Munich and Colombier, Switzerland. Since 1999 he has been a professor at the Munich Academy of Visual Arts. Since his participation in Documenta IX (1992) at the latest, Förg has been considered one of the most interesting of German contemporary artists. He works in a range of media: drawing, watercolor, painting, photography and sculpture complement each other on a basis of equality. For the Fondation Beyeler, Förg has conceived a stringent visual environment in which murals and photographs engender a vibrant spatial atmosphere. The murals serve to locate the large room in a specific continuum, their colors as it were embracing the space and “tuning” it. The composition is based on a precise conception. The two narrow end walls of the space are painted in a dark, bluish Paynes grey, while the approximately fifty-meter-long unbroken main wall is finished, in two nearly equal halves, in a Caput mortuum and a chrome oxide green. The remaining free walls are covered in a neutral medium grey. This specific color scheme suffuses the space with a challenging yet intensive atmosphere of contrasting warm and cold tones in which a series of twenty-one large-format photographs (180 x 120 cm each) are presented. This is a selection of earlier architectural photos in which Förg concerned himself with fundamental issues and selected examples of modern architecture. They photos show the Lange Residence in Krefeld, the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, the Wittgenstein House in Vienna, the singular Villa Malaparte on Capri, and Hans Poelzig’s IG Farben Building in Frankfurt. These are views taken through windows that draw attention to transitions from interior to exterior space. The imagery thus evokes the famous metaphor of a window revealing a view into a different world. The photographs are positive black and white prints taken from color negatives, in which the lighting conditions are reversed. As a result, the illusionistic effect of photographic reproductions gives way to the vague effect of dream imagery. The clarity of modern architecture dissolves into speculations tinged with melancholy – a finding that, depending on the weather, may be amplified or called into question by the view into the diffusely illuminated autumn landscape behind the Fondation Beyeler. OPENING HOURS: Daily 10.00 -18.00, Wed: 10.00 – 20.00 Image Credits: Günther Förg, Barcelona Pavillion, 2007, Colour photograph, Cibachrome, glass mounted, 180 x 120 cm, © Günther Förg View of installation, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Colour photograph, Cibachrome, glass mounted, 2007, 180 x 120 cm mounted on murals, © Günther Förg, Photo: Serge Hasenböhler View of installation, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Colour photograph, Cibachrome, glass mounted, 2007, 180 x 120 cm mounted on murals, © Günther Förg, Photo: Serge Hasenböhler  |
