The Code Factory: Works from the Eighties and Nineties

Over a career spanning five decades, Günther Förg (1952–2013) developed a distinctive and prolific body of work, including experiments in abstraction and monochrome painting, against the general trend of figurative painting predominant in Germany in the 1980s. Wall paintings, sculptures, large format photographs, portraits and architectural views, as well as drawings and graphics, executed in a range of mediums, bear witness to the innovative diversity of the artist’s approach. Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work. From the late 2000s, Förg’s painting took a brighter and more gestural turn, resulting from an intuitive approach to colour and composition.  

‘Art, artists, architecture, landscapes, films and literature are all constant sources of inspiration for Günther Förg, and the notion that art is generally more likely to be derived from other art than from nature comes through in his various work cycles and series as well. His spontaneity of conception and dynamic gesture is contrasted with complex references and their associated meanings. Förg is concerned with self-reflecting experience and self-analysis in painting. By referring to the most diverse of artists from widely varying eras and styles of the 20th century, he brings out individual positions that were arguably of unparalleled relevance to artistic practice in subsequent decades, while at the same time he links periods and ideologies that were often mutually contradictory.’

B. Reiss, Günther Förg: Paintings, Walls, and Photographs in Günther Förg 1987–2011, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2012

One of the most important painters of today, Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is internationally recognised for her bold, haptic paintings and saturated use of colour. Since the late 1990s, Grosse has employed a spraying technique to attack, redefine and subvert traditional notions of painting. Her kaleidoscopic vision spills into the physical world, sweeping across walls, floors, ceilings, everyday objects and sculptural structures. Through this radical inclusion of space as a field of action, the artist achieves a paradoxical clash of the expansion of colour with our material existence. Tracing the artist’s thought process or gaze, colour takes on a lifeforce of its own.

Parallel to her in-situ works, the artist continues to pursue her studio paintings. In her most recent canvases, vibrant loops of colour float, almost three-dimensionally, over white ground. As the colours intertwine like loose strands of thread, the paintings record Grosse’s ongoing reflections on density and velocity. Such works present a radical compression of movement and colour, creating the largest amount of action and entertainment possible over the smallest amount of surface. 

‘Paint as materiality and color as immediate chromaticity; raw industrial paints; complex layers of color and their various factual and optical entanglements; the use of stencils; the expansion of the painting beyond the boundaries of the canvas – these are some of the most significant methods through which Grosse creates structural openness but also startling fissures and ruptures. Rooted in process and experiment, chance and control, Grosse’s paintings frequently hover between form and dissolution of form and the liminal spaces in between, evoking perceptual uncertainties that are immersive and distracting at once. Ultimately, her paintings remain hermetic, resisting translation into language and narration.’

S. Eckmann, ‘Introduction’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, and travelling; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022, p. 13

Through modes of gestural intuition, craft and material command, the work of the German-French artist Hans Hartung (1904–1989) is distinguished by a pure painterly energy. A leading figure of Art Informel, Hartung combined material precision with notions of impulse, resulting in works characterised by a refined intensity. Known for his continuous innovation throughout his nearly seven-decade long career, the artist experimented with a range of tools spanning from tree branches to spray guns. With all of the breakthroughs that he made, Hartung leaves behind an artistic legacy with a lasting impact, and an extensive body of work which embodies the dynamism that predicated his life and work.

‘Everything that exists in the world is connected with everything else, in the same way that all Hartung’s lines and marks on paper and canvas are connected by the signs of time.

[…] Hartung rejected every canon that lay outside his gaze, which, ranging beyond every visual horizon, had turned in on himself, to the depths of his feeling and understanding, which offered him the only possibility of producing unique and original work.’

A. Barzel, Hans Hartung: In the beginning was lightning, Antibes: Hartung Fondation, 2007

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’.

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’

A. Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

Over the last five decades, Sean Scully (b. 1945) has developed a distinguished and prolific body of work through his distinct approach to contemporary abstraction. Shifting the paradigm in American abstraction from Minimalism and its reduced vocabulary, to an emotional form of abstraction, Scully’s practice offers a return to metaphor and spirituality as found in the European painting tradition. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, Scully’s works capture both the tonality of the visual world and human experience. Scully incorporates his sense of physical dynamism with influences drawn from the legacy of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, resulting in works that are as monumental in scale as they are in emotional poignancy.

Scully’s abstract compositions are evocative of architectural structures as much as forms in nature:  horizon lines, meeting points between earth and sky, rock formations, nature and buildings. ‘I’m trying to turn stone into light,’ he explains of his practice. Often comprised of coloured blocks, stripes or bands arranged on horizontal and vertical axes, these seemingly solid bricks of colour allow light to creep in through the cracks, grounding vast scale and gesture with a visual delicacy and sense of vulnerability.

‘The freedom Scully had sought in abstract painting to communicate the richness of experience – of memory and emotion – compelled him to also find a way to invest it with metaphor, to endow it with a narrative structure, and to connect it with the world. This was the crux of his argument with what he saw as the hermetic and self-referential nature of Minimalism, concluding that the movement had lost its energy and its sense of direction.’

T. Rub, in Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020

Since the late 1970s, Thomas Struth (b. 1954) has been capturing our time. Reconciling forms of documentation and contemplation, his photographs frame the world today as seen through empty streets in different cities, cultural venues, and scenes of worship, as well as images of nature, family portraits, and, more recently, sites of industrial and technological innovation, often underlining the tension between banality and the sublime. The examination of different situations and their impact on collective behaviour is typical of the artist’s work. His recent images introduce new subjects of reflection, such as the relationship between humans and machines.

‘Thomas Struth is a reluctant modernist. On the one hand, his photographs seek to capture, in non-distinct street scenes and amongst groups of anonymous tourists, the beauty found in ephemeral and fugitive moments rather than poses honed by tradition. These photographs discover beauty in what had been, before the advent of modernity, considered off-limits to aesthetic contemplation: the allegedly soulless architecture of post-war Europe; the poor dwellings in the emerging world; the back areas and unacknowledged zones where museums, cathedrals and other spaces of spiritual and cultural gathering are purely functional sites of usage. But in many of his photographs, Struth does not simply discover but inscribes beauty in unexpected places.’

U. Baer, ‘The Reluctant modernism of Thomas Struth’, in exh. cat., Thomas Struth, Napoli: MADRE Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, 2008