(Hong Kong, 17 March 2016) Massimo De Carlo gallery focuses on creating a dialogue between globally acknowledged contemporary artists, young and promising talents and more classical masters from the 50s and the 60s. In collaboration with the Günther Förg estate, the team is pleased to present ‘Förg’, a solo exhibition by the German artist with works that have never been seen before in Asia. Works will be on display from 27 May to 3 September 2016.
Caption: Untitled, 2008, Ex. Unique Acrilico / olio su tela / Acrylic / oil on canvas 290 x 400 cm / 114 11/64 x 157 31/64 inches
Massimo De Carlo has a long standing relationship with Michael Neff, a representative of Förg’s estate who used to be a gallerist. “Neff and I have built a friendship over the years and have mutual respect for each other’s professional work. In 2001, Neff held an exhibition by Paola Pivi and collaborated with us, which then led us to the memorable Förg/Fontana exhibition at MDC London in 2014 which only strengthened our bond. This exhibition in Hong Kong represents the on-going relationship between MDC and the estate,” says Massimo De Carlo, Owner of the gallery with an on-going role on the selection committee board of Art Basel Hong Kong.
In his practice Günther F¨ørg, who was highly inspired by abstract influences and modernism, has explored tangible ways of reflecting on materiality and on the gesture, using shapes and geometry in order to balance rational and irrational, the works of the mind and those of the gut, by tackling an array of mediums that include painting, sculpture and photography.
Caption: Massimo De Carlo gallery in Pedder Building, Hong Kong
The works in this exhibition mark a period of time in the artists’ life where he abandoned minimalism and Köln School structuralist inspired rigour to pursue the quest of pure abstraction, focusing on the painterly gesture, the brushstroke and spatiality. These experiments on abstraction translate into art the selection of thoughts around the notions of fragmentation and totality that have generated these mesmerizing canvases.
Förg focuses on a series of works on canvas that the artist commenced in 2007 where the element of colour, which the artist has investigated throughout his practice and expressed via different media, is key. The canvases in the exhibition are filled by a series of semi rectangular shapes, on a white back ground, that appear like islands of colours composed by scribbled lines, each shape in a different colour, varying from light pastel tones to bright and darker shades.
The vibrant colour palette of these works allows colour itself to partially overcome the ever importance of the logical shapes, grids, squares, lines – a constant in Günther Förg’s work – conferring to the canvases an ethereal, almost fairy tale like character. Through these shapes, Günther Förg combines the delicacy of the painterly gesture with the raging naveté of doodles and scribbles, a contrast between the fragile and also uneasy movement and the meditative yet firm quality of the work.
