Focus: Günther Förg/Bernard Frize

The German artist Günther Förg (b. 1952) gained a reputation in the 1980s for abstract compositions and murals that reactivated both the legacy of modernism and the conceptual painting of Blinky Palermo. In his photographic series Förg translates a specifically painterly interest in structure, order and temporality to large-scale tableaux. Icons of modern architecture, be they Italian rationalist buildings or the famed villa of poet Curzio Malaparte on Capri, backdrop to Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, are captured as dynamic snapshots. While Günther Förg’s work concentrates on visual principles of organisation, French artist Bernard Frize’s (b. 1954) pictures go out from the most elementary aspect of painting: the application of paint to canvas. Using a variety of arrangements, Frize investigates the conditions necessary for the creation of paintings, for instance by deploying the potential of painting utensils as the subject of a picture. Endless meanders of colour fade away on the canvas, demonstrating the impulse of the brush; colour progressions become spiritual landscapes, while colourist compositions emerge from skins of dried paint. Bernard Frize's reflections focus concisely on the processual character of painting, for every picture is always only one of the many possibilities that might have materialized.

'Focus: Günther Förg / Bernard Frize' opens a new series of exhibitions at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst presenting new acquisitions, work groups and installations in a larger framework.