Artworks from German artist Günther Förg's later years have made their Asian debut at Massimo De Carlo Gallery in Hong Kong as part of “Förg,” an exhibition running until September 3.The canvases in the exhibition, created using acrylic and oil and featuring bright colors on white backgrounds in block or scribble formations, come from 2007 and 2008. This was a period in which the artist was experimenting with pure color, creating works vastly different from his earlier oeuvre.While prior to 2007, Förg's most famous work was structuralist and often incorporated lines, grids and geometry, the art he produced from that year onwards until his death in 2013 revels in a seemingly random chaotic placement of colored shapes. This marks a significant shift from the monochrome black works that first gained the artist international attention in the 1970s.The gallery says in a press release that the canvases “trap the viewer in a sort of personal synaesthesia, relatable to both the particular and the universal,” reflecting the artist’s belief that “abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more.”These paintings, which have been exhibited fairly widely in Europe and America, come to Hong Kong courtesy of Massimo De Carlo’s relationship with the Günther Förg estate run by Michael Neff, previously of Berlin’s Gallery Weekend and Villa Grisebach auction house. “Neff and I have built a friendship over the years and have mutual respect for each other’s professional work,” De Carlo has said of their collaboration, which was strengthened by a Förg exhibition in London in 2014 and continues with this show in Hong Kong.“Förg” runs through September 3 at Massimo De Carlo.
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