Vertical Format, Horizontally
Art at the ibc: Günther
Förg
In 2001, Günther Förg
was honored as "Artist of the Fiscal Year" with a large one-person
exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Along with paintings,
drawings, and large-scale architectural photographs from the Deutsche Bank
Collection, five new site-specific paintings were on show - painted
windows that also form the leitmotif for his new monumental work for the
ibc in Frankfurt. Brigitte Werneburg on Günter Förg's window
paintings and his take on the globalized world.
Günther Förg, Ohne Titel, 2004
Deutsche Bank Collection
Auguste Perret championed the tradition of the
vertical format, while
Le Corbusier was for the revolution, the horizontal format. They
fought over the window form as the architectonic expression of the proper
attitude towards a modern world. For Auguste Perret, who along with
Robert Mallet Stevens and Le Corbusier was one of the most influential
architects of French modernism, the window stood for the "upright man." On
the other hand, to Le Corbusier's mind, only the horizontal panoramic
window paid tribute to the modern perspective, which he equated with the
camera eye.
Günther Förg's work cannot be understood without examining
his basic approach to a given spacial situation. Förg often extends the
painting's colors to the surrounding architecture and walls to accentuate
the arena in which he stages his paintings, often in sequence, as spacial
objects hovering between painting and sculpture. Long before the idea of
the site-specific artwork and the installation became the standard in
Germany, Förg was interested in creating a situation that represented the
work of art.
Günther Förg, Ohne Titel, 2004
Deutsche Bank Collection
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Günther Förg, Villa Wittgenstein II (links)
+ III (rechts), 1987
Deutsche
Bank Collection
At the Frankfurt
headquarters of Deutsche Bank's
Private & Business Clients, the following situation can now be
observed: in the entrance hall to the
ibc building, an exemplary specimen of modernist architecture, Günther
Förg has hung two of his window paintings opposite one another. Both works
are horizontal in format, cinema screens in the sense of Le Corbusier.
Despite this, one of them stands for the conservative upright man - the
traditional high, narrow window, illuminated in red and divided by a black
cross, placed on the right side of the blue canvas. In contrast, the other
painting is dominated by the horizontal. The sequence of three
superimposed colored strips of green, black, and blue can be read as the
perspective of a driver looking through a windshield at a landscape. Yet
Günther Förg calls this perspective immediately into question, vertically
subdividing the painting into two narrow, orange-colored stripes and
presenting it as a vertical format in three parts.
Now, in the
exhibition situation addressing the architecture and window motif, the
argument between Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier seems both present and
annulled. "Every painting is a window onto the world," as Förg explains in
a conversation about his work for the ibc, referring to a view of art that
has been a standard since the Renaissance. But what do paintings look like
from the moving camera or car perspective, when the window suddenly begins
to move in the modern era? And what does this moving window itself consist
of?
Time has shown that the upright man - always so concerned about
his posture - has been conquered. Our view of reality has taken on a
horizontal format. Increasingly, we see the world - the whole, globalized
world - with its earthquakes, wars, parties, and political summit
meetings, through the media window, whether it be the television or
computer screen. Windows to the world á la
Microsoft. Yet the classical medium of the vertical format already bowed
considerably earlier to the pressure of the horizontal format. In
newspapers, the really important images have always been printed in
double-page spreads, while the latest status symbol of the modern
household is the flat screen, stretched out to a nearly absurd width.
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