Looking back to an artistic vocabulary belonging to his early career, Förg’s work from the 1990s revisits the monochromatic and straight lined. Shifting his focus, however, to an interrogation of gestural mark-making, the classic form of the grid simultaneously appears as a repeated motif that is transformed and manipulated through the artist’s expressive application of paint.

Between 1988 and 1998, in a project entitled ‘Barcelona Pavillion,’ Förg photographed Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion that had been built for the International Exposition of 1929 and was reconstructed in 1986. In these photographs he captures doors and window frames that inflect Barnett Newman’s ‘zips.’ They appear as vertical marks – stripes – pressed upon the picture and direct the viewer’s attention to the surface of the photograph rather than to the illusionary space that the image depicts. The canvases of 1999 to 2001 similarly reflect these conceptual influences. Offering variations on a theme, the grid – which also established the inner structure of the artist’s Window Paintings (particularly those of 1992 and 1993) – is layered on top of Förg’s expressive, gestural backgrounds. The grid-like structures or vertical bands rendered in high contrast colors allude to the influence of Newman’s ‘zips’ as much as to architectural references, suggesting window panes or balcony balustrades, to the Fascist era constructions of the IG Farben Haus in Frankfurt and Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv, which Förg had been documenting during these years.

At same time these works recall the artist’s 1970s Grey Paintings. Creating canvases of material sensuality, each brushstroke becomes visible: from dense opaque washes of charcoal and lead to areas of smokey haze and near- transparent surfaces of silvery white. Inflected with striking smudges and drips of color in yellow, orange, and green, Forg’s expressive hand commands a rhythmic spontaneity and freedom that foreshadows the trajectory and summation of the artist’s last works.

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