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.
Since 1992, Günther Förg's grid paintings 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 Pollock, 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.
Where Förg takes up geometric order only to unsettle it from within, Appel begins with the free gesture. Yet the gesture is never without form. Layers of paint accumulate into zones of density, repetition, and sweeping lines, gradually giving rise to an organic order of their own.
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 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.
The title Out of Nature can be read less as a reference to landscape than as a suggestion of the source of the painterly gesture itself. Nature does not appear here as a subject to be depicted, but as something carried forward through the movement, rhythm, and materiality of paint. What initially presents itself as spontaneous expression gradually develops its own internal order through repetition and accumulation.
It is here, precisely where they appear most distant, that Förg and Appel begin to converge. Förg pushes order toward gesture without relinquishing it; Appel pushes gesture toward order without fully containing it. Förg's grid is not rigid, nor is Appel's gesture formless. Each retains something of its original character even as it moves toward its opposite. In both, control and instinct, construction and movement remain active within the same pictorial field, without one ultimately prevailing over the other.
Neither series belongs to the beginning of its artist's career. Appel was already in his seventies when, in Out of Nature, he returned to a painting of intense physical and chromatic immediacy-a rediscovery as much as a continuation. Förg's grid paintings likewise emerged not as a programmatic beginning but within an already established painterly oeuvre. The two works brought into focus here are both dated 1996: one by a German, the other by a Dutch artist, made under different conditions and on opposite sides of the Atlantic-and now brought into direct proximity.
Grid and Gesture does not seek to dissolve the distance between these two positions. On the contrary, that distance is its point of departure. The exhibition does not present Förg and Appel as artists belonging to a shared school, nor as simple opposites, but as two independent positions within painting's continuing negotiation between order and instinct, construction and physical action.
What begins as a rule in one moves toward gesture; what begins as gesture in the other gradually acquires its own order. Whether the two ever fully meet remains unresolved. The tension between them remains.
