Gunther Forg valuation
Painted on lead and copper, photographed modernist buildings, and left the grid deliberately unfinished.
Gunther Forg was born in Bavaria in 1952, studied in Munich, and worked across painting, photography, sculpture and architecture with a consistent scepticism about all four.
What a work by Gunther Forg is worth
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Bio
Gunther Forg was born in Bavaria in 1952, studied in Munich, and worked across painting, photography, sculpture and architecture with a consistent scepticism about all four. He painted directly onto sheets of lead and copper mounted on wood, so the ground shows through and oxidises; he photographed the architecture of Italian rationalism and Bauhaus modernism in large, deliberately imperfect prints; and from the 1990s he made the grid and lattice paintings, and finally the loose Spot paintings of his last years, in which the mark is left frankly casual. He taught in Munich and Karlsruhe and died in 2013.
Forg's market grew sharply after his death and has attracted a corresponding forgery problem, particularly around the late Spot paintings, several of which have been the subject of public disputes. Provenance to a documented gallery source is essential rather than desirable. The lead and copper works have their own conservation issues, since the metal ground continues to react and the surface is not stable in the ordinary sense. Photographs exist in small editions and should be identified by edition and print date. The Estate of Gunther Forg is the authority.
Munich, the monochromes and the grids
Förg studied at the Munich academy under Karl Fred Dahmen from 1973 to 1979, painting almost nothing but black monochromes in his first years there, and his first solo exhibition, of monochrome paintings, was at the Rüdiger Schöttle gallery in Munich in 1980. In 1988 he installed mirror walls in a Rotterdam metro station, demolished in 1999, and the grid paintings began in 1992, growing out of earlier window watercolours.
He was in documenta IX in 1992, showed at the Stedelijk Museum in 1995, and taught at Karlsruhe from 1992 to 1999 before Munich. In his lifetime he showed with Max Hetzler, Greene Naftali and Almine Rech, and since 2018 the estate has been represented by Hauser & Wirth. He died at Colombier, near Neuchâtel, in 2013.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
