01/09/2026
Opening soon!
Günther Förg | Karel Appel
Grid and Gesture
Opening 10 September, 6-8 pm
Two seemingly opposed visual languages occupy this space: the grid and the gesture.
Günther Förg’s grid paintings (Gitterbilder), which emerged in the early 1990s have taken up one of the defining forms of modern abstraction—the grid, with its inheritance of Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus—and subjected it to a loose, drawn, and deliberately unruly hand. The lines do not seek to establish a perfect order. They drift, overlap, double back on themselves. Paint is applied with a palpable sense of immediacy. The loosened, almost calligraphic quality of Förg’s line has at times invited comparison with the gestural painting of Cy Twombly, suggesting how closely grid and gesture have been intertwined in his work from the outset. The grid structures the pictorial field while simultaneously unsettling it.
Karel Appel’s Out of Nature series, painted in New York in 1995 and 1996, appears to proceed from the opposite pole: the instinctive, immediate stroke, the physical energy of painting that had occupied Appel since the early years of CoBrA. The location is significant. In New York in the 1950s, Appel encountered artists such as Jackson Po***ck, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, and a generation of American painters who were radicalizing gestural abstraction in their own terms. Four decades later, he returned to New York and to an energy that belonged as much to his own history as to a renewed impulse toward immediacy….)
Although the two series face one another across the gallery, they converge on a common question, approached from opposite directions: What happens to order under an unsteady hand—and what happens to instinct when repetition gives rise to structure?
(The full text ist available on our website)
Günther Förg
untitled 2004
Acrylic on canvas
120 x 90 cm
Photo: Jann Averwerser
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