This winter season Hauser & Wirth, an international gallery devoted to contemporary and modern art, is bringing the work of one of the most significant post-war German artists to Tarmak22 in Gstaad: Günther Förg.

Multidisciplinary artist
Günther Förg was a painter, graphic designer, sculptor and photographer whose work is held in numerous public collections around the world. In a career that started in the early 1970s at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, Förg’s style was influenced by American abstract painting. Initially working almost exclusively in grey and black monochrome, Förg embarked on what would become a lifelong commitment to the conceptual advancement of art. He experimented with different surfaces, materials, patinas and gestural mark-making, with one body of work influencing the next.

Mostly Landscapes
The Mostly Landscapes exhibition focuses on Förg’s later years, drawing on the relationship between his works spanning the period from 1997 to 2009. Comprising photographs, acrylic paintings and other works on paper – executed in a variety of materials from charcoal to oil to ink – they bring together different elements of Förg’s multidisciplinary practice.

The large-format photographs, taken in the winter of 1997, depict landscapes covered in deep snow. Photographed whilst riding in a carriage through a valley in the Swiss Alps, these black and white images look beyond nature and evoke the monochrome palette of Förg’s early works. His enthusiasm for the structure and form of nature shows through in these photographs, an interest which influenced the motifs Förg later employed in his art. These photographs were also the source of inspiration for Förg’s series ‘mostly landscapes’, created more than a decade later in 2009, and are presented side-by-side for the first time in this exhibition.

The exhibition also includes a selection of acrylic paintings on wood from 2004, in which Förg uses distinctive grid-like hatching, combining harsh black strokes with patches of vivid colour. Displayed above eye-level, these works appear like a frieze against the backdrop of the stunning Tarmak22 exhibition space, with views over Gstaad and the Alps.

His works on display from 2007 to 2009 are reminiscent of Förg’s conceptual photographs of forests, where he makes use of motifs and marks that resemble trees and allude to Alpine landscapes. He further strengthens and enhances this connection to nature by his use of earthy colours. Meanwhile, the exhibition also includes pastels, which continue the style of Förg’s more abstract paintings. Forming part of his 2008 ‘Aller Retour’ series, they use a brighter palette to create clusters of colour.

Together, the works in the ‘Mostly Landscapes’ exhibition demonstrate Förg’s masterful blurring of boundaries between various disciplines, bringing together his practice as a conceptual whole.

ANNA CHARLES

Mostly Landscapes; 18 December – 16 January at Tarmak22, Gstaad Airport; Tuesday – Sunday 11:00 – 17:00, or by appointment: +41 33 748 6200.