10/09/2026
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Günther Förg | Karel Appel
Grid and Gesture
The juxtaposition touches on a fundamental tension within postwar modernism. Appel’s generation had turned against the rationalized geometry associated with Mondrian, De Stijl, and the Constructivist tradition, finding in gestural painting a crucial counter-model. Four decades later, Förg encountered this European and American history from an entirely different historical position. For him, the grid was no longer simply an alternative to gestural painting. It had become a historically charged image-sign: a form to be cited, examined, and transformed.
Förg’s sustained engagement with this history is also evident in his photographic work, through which he repeatedly documented the architecture of classical modernism. In his work, the grid is never an innocent form; it carries the historical memory of its architectural and ideological origins.
On Förg’s canvases, the rule begins to fracture at the very moment it is drawn. This becomes particularly forceful in one of the grid paintings from 1996, set against a deep blue ground. Red and blue grid structures spread across the surface, while two broad, hastily applied white strokes cut vertically through them. The white bands obey no predetermined order. They interrupt the grid and threaten to overwhelm its fragile construction. Here, gesture does more than loosen the rule-for a moment, it seems to erase it altogether.
Appel’s paintings pursue the same tension in the opposite direction. Where Förg’s grid begins to dissolve under the pressure of gesture, Appel’s gesture tends toward structure. In the work shown here, also dated 1996, forms emerge that may suggest branches, bodies, faces, or other organic configurations without ever resolving into anything definite. They rise out of the paint only to disappear back into it. Dark, sweeping lines branch across reds, blues, whites, and earthy tones; the heavily worked surface acquires an almost relief-like physicality. The painting hovers between figuration and abstraction, refusing to settle fully into either.
