Günther Förg & Julian Lethbridge: Ballad of a Thin Man by Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery

GÜNTHER FÖRG JULIAN LETHBRIDGE BALLAD OF A THIN MAN

GÜNTHER FÖRG JULIAN LETHBRIDGE BALLAD OF A THIN MAN TEXT LOUISA ELDERTON SIEGFRID GOHR

CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS BERLIN 2019

“People bring themselves to the work.” Julian Lethbridge

“For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more.” Günther Förg

ME CREATING YOU LOUISA ELDERTON People bring themselves to the work. 1 — Julian Lethbridge For me, abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more. 2 — Günther Förg The relationship between the artwork and the viewer: what a monogamous affair. When they speak, really speak, it’s like no one else is in the room. No one else matters. This connection is rare, like any truly special bond. Perhaps this is overly romanticised, but haven’t we all felt that? That something, perhaps unnameable, which a work of art can spark in us; igniting a feeling or an understanding that didn’t exist just a moment beforehand. From very different artistic positions, Julian Lethbridge and Günther Förg, who meet in Ballad of a Thin Man at Contemporary Fine Arts, have both described the phenomenon of people bringing themselves to the work of art, of seeing what one wants to see. Lethbridge has spoken of finding ‘abstract art to be a bottomless well of rewards, largely because it leaves so much room for the imagination, for different ways of thinking and seeing.’ 3 He understood that from the Abstract Expressionists. In 1972 at the age of twenty-five, he left the UK for New York. He soon integrated into the metropolis’ art scene, renting a flat on the Lower East Side for $106 dollars a month, seeing exhibitions by Jasper Johns, Joseph Beuys, Picasso even. He visited friends’ studios but practiced in private, painting and painting until he felt he might be getting somewhere, showing only close friends. What did they see, then? What do you see, now? Does fleshing out of his biography prevent the artist from dying when you come to slaughter him? How does the conversation begin, between you and his work of art? Look, for example, at Lethbridge’s Roundel (2018). His patterns are born from a structured method: he is meticulous, begins by using a palette knife to inscribe

Roundel 2018

Capital I 2018

a grid. This framework lays the ground upon which he works, where he creates motion by twisting, hooking, caressing paint on the canvas. It seems to be whirling, doesn’t it? Dynamic. A vortex slowly turning at the painting’s centre. It flutters too, individual shapes counteracting one another, sweeping this way, arching there, curving here. In a monochrome palette, whites and blacks combine into a dappled grey. Each disc could be turning, rhythmically. Or are they lozenges that you could suck slowly and then spit out, saliva blurring the space of this surface. Somehow it’s a storm, one that is about to pull you in, slurp you up and spew you out. And now you’re standing here, soaked, covered in Lethbridge’s marks. Who has devoured whom: did you impose your imagination onto the canvas, or did the canvas consume you? Lethbridge has also said: ‘Sometimes a comment seems to me totally absurd, but it is often times more helpful to let that exist than to deny it and push it away.’4 Letting something exist. Letting someone exist. Attempting not to devour. Failing. So these works breathe, sway, so they pulse with energy. *** Roland Barthes is the godfather here. “The Death of the Author”, his famous 1968 essay, killed the artist off altogether: ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’. 5 We wouldn’t be here without them, finding meaning in what they’ve done, but we still inadvertently wield the knife. Barthes describes how ‘the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text … and every text is eternally written here and now’.6 The reader (viewer) absorbs what lies before her, creates a complex network of associations in mere moments, and eradicates anything she cannot gauge. If she doesn’t feel it, it doesn’t exist. Of course, with art, it’s an embodied experience too, the body moves, repositions its form and shape to size up a relationship to the work of art — me creating you, even though you are already here, hanging on the wall, or standing there in space, waiting for me to breath life into you. Projecting. Slaughtering. ***

Förg grew up in the 1950s, born in a small Bavarian town in deep southern Germany, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in the mid-1970s (where he would later return as a professor in 1999). While East Germany became increasingly isolated, by the 1980s the contemporary art world had infiltrated West Germany. Förg’s own circle included the likes of Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger and Georg Herold. He worked in series, moving through abstraction and figuration to encompass painting, sculpture and photography. As he said: ‘I’m always moving between disciplines’. 7 Like Lethbridge, he too was scrupulous, but his bronze heads in particular embrace imperfections. A perfectionist who left next to nothing to chance, here Förg incorporates imperfection into the play of creation. They are dimpled, pushed, prodded, poked. He wanted these Vier Bronzeköpfe (1994) to feel human, to be pitted. Perhaps he wanted you to see yourself in them. Even their proportions feel bodily, the plywood plinths mimic the verticality of the figure, soft and porous, topped with a hard head. Take a moment to look into their eyes. They are heavy, weighted. They recall the swirling brushwork of Edvard Munch’s faces, Förg’s finger marks mould bronzed flesh and make it monstrous. Yet despite these marks, the artist disappears, and we’re left with the forms that he brought into being. By leaving signs of the creator, he invites the presence of the viewer — to interpret, relate and overtake. Förg’s dragging fingers are perhaps even more evident in his two-dimensional bronze relief series, of which an untitled example from 1986 is on view. It could be a painting or a sculpture. Or a torso. A prison from behind which someone claws. He noted that ‘the reliefs, physically, have elevations and depressions, not unlike those of a face’ 8 – or the wrinkles, lines and stretch marks that come with living in our bodies. During this period, he also made towering steles – stones or slabs that were commonplace in the ancient world, often used as monuments or for commemorative purposes. His are fittingly primordial, scaled to appear even larger than us. Of course they are abstract, but they are also so human — perhaps, in this context, a monument to the slaughtered artist, but moreover, a statement of physicality within space that the viewer must navigate. Having begun his career in the early 1970s painting dark monochrome canvases in acrylic, on top of which he applied grey, milky, almost transparent veils, these bronze reliefs collapse such a surface – perforating it, clawing down the veil with an aggressive hand. There are also human traces in Förg’s Farbfeld (1986) made in the same year as this relief. In thinly painted oil and acrylic wash on plywood, his planes of colour have irregular surfaces, the material quality of the medium and ground working together in harmony to become expressive. The rich tones of orange, blue, green, brown and black are hand painted and subtly gestural: the importance of such materiality, such handling is at the core of Förg’s art. Unlike the Abstract Expressionists before him, he was unconcer-

ned with the metaphysical potential of painting, interested instead in the majesty of material, and in the physical manipulation of matter. Also scaled to the human body are Förg’s photographs, shot using a 35 mm camera. In his words, they ‘function more like a relief, like a sculptural element. They have a particular sense of size and scale and a relationship is figured to your own body in space, it’s a very tactile thing’.9 They too reveal power structures: his subjects were Modernist buildings, which he travelled extensively to capture. He visited many Bauhaus buildings as well as the Wittgenstein House in Vienna, Casa del Fascio in Rome – which housed the National Fascist Party under the regime of Italian Fascism – and Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri. You can almost walk into them. In The Fall (1984), it is easy to feel implicated by whatever has come to pass: I swear I didn’t push him; I wasn’t even there. A man lies facedown, limbs sprawled at the bottom of a wrought iron stairwell. The perspective of the camera is so sharp in relation to the banister as to flatten the view, so that he is almost suspended, lifeless, in the centre of the composition. He looks classic in his dark suit, perhaps he might even be handsome, if it wasn’t for… The tiled floor appears hard and cold, beautifully bordered with a black and white pattern. There are no clues. He’s not moving – or at least he wasn’t, when the photograph was taken. So where were you, and how did this man come to be there? Speak up! You’re looking. And it’s a slaughterhouse in here.

1 Julian Lethbridge, exh. cat. ‘Inside Out’, 2017, New York: Paula Cooper Gallery; Berlin: Contemporary Fine Arts, p. 41. 2 Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty, exh. cat. ‘Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty’, 2018–2019, Dallas Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, p. 182. 3 Julian Lethbridge, p. 48. 4 Ibid., p.41

5 Modern Criticism and Theory, A Reader, Eds., David Lodge with Nigel Wood (Singapore: Addison Wesley Longman, 1988), pp. 145¬-46. 6 Ibid. 7 Günther Förg: A Fragile Beauty, p.115. 8 Ibid., p. 112. 9 Ibid., p. 114.

Farbfeld 1986

MAKE IT NEW SIEGFRIED GOHR „Make it new“ - so hieß 2004 ein umfangreiches Buch, das anlässlich einer Förg-Ausstellung in Recklinghausen erschien und einen Überblick über das weit verzweigte Schaffen des Künstlers erlaubte. Die Grundintention von Förg traf der Titel genau, seit er in den siebziger Jahren seine künstlerische Laufbahn begann. Damals war der optimistische Geist der sechziger Jahre verflogen und die entfesselten achtziger Jahre waren noch nicht spürbar. Es gab ein verbreitetes Krisengefühl. Das Ende des Nachkriegsbooms, eine daraus resultierende hohe Arbeitslosigkeit, Abschied von gewohnten Sicherheiten, zwei Ölkrisen 1973 und 1979, Konflikte im Iran, in Nicaragua, Deutscher Herbst, russischer Einmarsch in Afghanistan, Atomunglück in Harrisburg. Dieses und manches andere sorgten für einen bangen Blick in die Gegenwart, die einer zweifelhaften Zukunft kaum Halt bot. Andererseits waren die siebziger Jahre grell, bunt, laut, verrückt: Schlaghosen, Plateauschuhe, Pop Kultur, Hippies, Neue Medien, Spaß und Unterhaltung im Fernsehen und Film ließen das Jahrzehnt vibrieren – genussreich und ohne die politischen Träume der sechziger Jahre. Als Günther Förg 1973 in München zu studieren begann, war dieses Jahrzehnt im Gange und die Widersprüche förderten einen Pragmatismus, den Förg von Beginn an spielerisch auslebte. „Make ist new“ - das Motto erlaubte Rückblicke und Neubewertungen. Im Fall von Förg betraf dies die Abstraktion und den Modernismus. Wie konnte er aus dem Ende des Booms der Kunst bis in die sechziger Jahre, als die Moderne in mehreren Wellen an ein Ende gekommen war, neue Funken schlagen? Die Antwort: Angstfrei vor Nachahmung, Wiederholung und Epigonentum, selbstbewusst und aus dem Geist einer Leichtigkeit, die dem Ernst und dem Moralismus der Moderne fremd war. Obwohl Förg die Materialien und die Vokabeln der Moderne verwendete, hatten sich seine Haltung und sein Verhältnis zu dieser Epoche der Kunst grundsätzlich geändert. Darauf wird noch zurückzukommen sein. Als Blinky Palermo 1973 im fernen Sri Lanka starb, verlor Förg einen Bruder im Geiste. Aber seine Reaktion war zugleich verblüffend und logisch: Warum sollte er Palermos Erbe ausschlagen, dem er sich sehr verbunden fühlte? Er nahm es als seine Aufgabe und Pflicht an, das Werk des Freun-

Maske I 1994

Maske II 1994

des weiterzudenken und fortzuführen. An diesem Punkt wird erkennbar, dass Förg nicht berührt ist von jener „Einflussangst“, welche vor allem Literatur und Kunst der Moderne unter Zwang gesetzt hat. Der Vater-SohnKonflikt, der sich als Einflussangst äußerst, ist nicht Förgs Antrieb; denn die ödipale Konstellation gehört der Vergangenheit an, sie war kein produktives Problem mehr. „Make it new“, dieses Motto gilt auch für die Wandmalereien, die Farbkonstellationen oder die Bleibilder. Es hieß nicht: Mach‘ es anders, sondern neu auf der Grundlage, die ein anderer bereitgestellt hatte, z. B. Blinky Palermo. Dieser hatte mit seinen geometrischen Streifenbildern aus Stoff und mit den auf Metall gemalten Gruppen neue Farbkonstellationen erprobt, die über den Dreiklang „Rot-Gelb-Blau“ eines Piet Mondrian oder der Bauhaus-Künstler hinausging. Die Farbpalette wurde in Abstufungen aufgefächert, die auch den Komplementärkontrast relativierte. Seltene und kaum verwendete Pigmente wurden entdeckt, so dass in Förgs Atelier ein beeindruckendes Regal mit Gläsern voller Pigmente in feinsten Abstufungen den Besucher staunen ließ. Das Erbe Palermos wurde so verschwenderisch und lustvoll ausgestaltet, dass etwas Neues entstand. Je weiter das Werk während der achtziger Jahre fortschritt, desto mehr Gattungen und Stile hat Förg neu bestimmt und seinem sich dehnenden Universum hinzugefügt, zum Beispiel die Photographie. Während die allgegenwärtige Becher-Schule den Ton angab, verfolgte Förg einen ganz anderen Weg, indem er sich mit Inkunabeln der Architekturgeschichte auseinandersetzte wie Curzio Malapartes Villa auf einer Felsenhöhe in Capri, mit dem Haus Wittgenstein in Wien, das der Philosoph Ludwig Wittgenstein für eine Verwandte entwarf, mit der russischen Architektur der Moderne, z. B. von Konstantin Melnikow, oder mit der Bauhaus-Architektur in Tel Aviv. Immer ging Förg ohne Scheu an zentrale Äußerungen des Modernismus heran, fand neue Blickwinkel und befreite die Moderne aus ihrem Pathos, Heroismus und ihrem konstruktiven Schema. Im Vergleich zur Bauhaus-Ästhetik wirken Förgs Aufnahmen wie ein Befreiungsschlag. Unscharfe Fotos waren zugelassen, die Kamera wurde manchmal bei der Aufnahme geschwenkt, die Perspektiven lösten sich von der Herrschaft des Stativs. Förg fand Blickwinkel, die mehr mit Rodtschenko und dessen Zeitgenossen zu tun hatten, als mit der herrschenden Dokumentarfotografie. „Make it new“ – das hieß jetzt, diesen Bauten ihr Potential an Überraschungen, ungewohnten Blickachsen und faszinierenden Details zurückzuerstatten. Förgs Leichtigkeit im Umgang, das Spielerische seiner Arbeiten wirkten, als ob er das ganze moderne Programm noch einmal unter dem Vorzei-

chen einer neuen Zeit aufrollte. Der Pragmatismus der siebziger Jahre kam Förg entgegen, den ironischen Ton und die manchmal unverschämte Vorgehensweise seiner Zeitgenossen hat Förg nicht übernommen, aber seine formalen Entscheidungen entlasteten das moderne Material, ohne es ungültig zu machen. Deshalb bleibt den Arbeiten etwas erhalten, das als Wärme, Strahlkraft oder „nicht expressive“ Expressivität bezeichnet werden könnte. Dies gilt offensichtlich für die vier Masken von 1994. Seit dem späten 18. Jahrhundert, als Franz Xavier Messerschmidt seine Charakterköpfe schuf, die heute im Wiener Belvedere zu bestaunen sind, haben sich die Bildhauer Masken, Grotesken, Deformationen des Gesichts als Motive gewählt. Um die Genealogie von Förgs Masken zu verfolgen, ist es nicht nötig, weit in die Historie zurückzublicken; denn die Inspiration stammt von Jean Fautrier, dessen Werk Förg schätzte und dessen Papierarbeiten in seiner Sammlung einen Platz hatten. Wenn es um die Differenz geht, welche die Masken-Gruppe der Vorgänger von derjenigen von 1994 unterscheidet, dann lässt sich beobachten, dass Fautriers Tragik einer Deformation gewichen ist, die oszilliert zwischen Ironie, Groteske, Reduktion, aber nicht als möglich, sondern als Spiel, als Experiment nicht menschlichem Ausdruck, der jedoch nicht endgültig festgelegt ist. Deshalb die Serie. Wieder gelangt der Betrachter an den Punkt des „Make it new“. Wesentlich dabei ist, dass nicht alles Vorausgegangene verworfen wird, sondern in eine neue Gestaltung aufgehoben wird, in einen dialektischen Vorgang, der die These (Modell der Vergangenheit), die Anti-These (Förgs eigene Zeit) zur Synthese des „Make it new“ bringt. Postskriptum Selbstbildnis als ein Anderer Curzio Malaparte, Sohn eines deutschen Vaters und einer Mutter aus Mailand, war eine schillernde Persönlichkeit, der Journalist und Dichter, Kriegsfreiwilliger und Diplomat war. 1922 nahm er am Marsch auf Rom der Faschisten teil, entfernt sich aber bald mit seinen Publikationen von dieser Bewegung. 1933 wurde er auf die Insel Lipari verbannt, jedoch nach einem Jahr wieder freigelassen. Er war Kriegsberichterstatter. Aber auch Anhänger der kommunistischen Partei. Persönlich befreundet mit Palmiro Togliatti. Schließlich konvertierte er kurz vor seinem Tod 1957 zum Katholizismus. Die Villa Malaparte ließ er Ende der 1930er Jahre am Capo

Maske III 1994

Maske IV 1994

Masullo auf Capri von dem Architekten Adalberto Libera erbauen, Kulisse für den Film von Jean-Luc Godard „Le Mepris (Die Verachtung)“. Der Lebenslauf von Curzio Malaparte lässt ein selbstbestimmtes Leben erkennen, das sich in den Wirren des 20. Jahrhunderts den Blick für die Menschentatsachen bewahrt hat. Die Lektüre seines Romans „Kaputt“ bestätigt diese innere Freiheit. Nicht nur die Architektur von Libera, auch die Persönlichkeit des Bauherrn hat Günther Förg fasziniert, so dass gerade diese Fotos wie ein heimliches Selbstbildnis gesehen werden können. Siegfried Gohr

MAKE IT NEW SIEGFRIED GOHR Make it new. A comprehensive catalogue published on the occasion of Förg’s 2004 exhibition in Recklinghausen offers an extensive overview of the artist‘s oeuvre and takes this slogan as its title. The title reflects Förg’s original intention as an artist when he began working in the 1970s. The optimism of the sixties had faded and the unbridled spirit of the eighties had not yet materialized. A sense of crisis was widespread: a post-war boom drove high unemployment – farewell to familiar security – the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 were compounded by conflicts in Iran, in Nicaragua, the German Autumn, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the nuclear accident in Harrisburg. These situations and others around the world made the present fearful and the future dubious. On the other hand, the seventies were bright, colorful, loud and crazy: bell bottoms, platform shoes, pop culture, hippies, new media, fun, television and film entertainment all made the decade vibrate with enjoyment, free from the political preoccupations of the sixties. When Günther Förg began studying in Munich in 1973, this decade was afoot. Its contradictions encouraged a pragmatism that Förg lived in a playful way from the beginning.

Make it new, as a motto, encourages review and re-evaluation. For Förg, this concerned abstraction and modernism. How could he, looking back at the art boom of the sixties when modernity had come to an end in waves, light new sparks? The answer: fearless imitation, repetition, confidence and a lightness of spirit alien to the moralizing seriousness of modernity. Although Förg utilized the materials and vocabulary of modernity, his attitude and his relationship to this era of art was fundamentally different. We will return to that. When Blinky Palermo died in faraway Sri Lanka in 1973, Förg lost a brother in spirit. But his reaction was both startling and logical: why should he turn down Palermo‘s heritage, which he felt very attached to? He took it as his task and duty to think ahead and continue the work of his friend. At this point, it becomes apparent that Förg is entirely unencumbered by the “fear of influence,” which left swathes of creators of modern art and literature under duress. The father-son conflict – a fear of influence – is not Förg’s

Sturz II 1984 35

Ohne Titel / Untitled 1986 36

drive. This Oedipal constellation belonged to the past, it was no longer a productive problem.

Make it new, this motto also applies to the color fields, the wall paintings or the lead works. Here, it doesn’t mean do it differently, but do it again, within the basis that someone else has provided, like Blinky Palermo. He tried out new color constellations with his geometrical stripes on cloth and metal, moving beyond the red-yellow-blue trios of Piet Mondrian or the Bauhaus. Here, the color palette is gradated as it fans out, tempering the complementary contrast between shades. Förg sought out rare and hardly-used pigments, assembling glasses full of them on a shelf in his studio that often astonished his visitors. Förg took on Palermo’s heritage so lavishly and lustfully that something new emerged. As his practice progressed through the eighties, Förg drew more types and styles of work, like photography, for instance, into his ever-expanding universe. While the ubiquitous Becher school set the tone, Förg forged a very different path by dealing with the incunabula of architectural history, such as Curzio Malaparte‘s villa on a cliff in Capri, the Wittgenstein house in Vienna, which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein designed for a relative, Russian modernist architecture, like buildings designed by Konstantin Melnikow, or Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture. Förg always approached central statements of modernism without hesitation. He continuously found new perspectives and liberated modernity from its pathos, heroism and constructive scheme. Förg’s shots liberate the Bauhaus aesthetics they capture. The photos were blurry, the camera panned, the rule of thirds disregarded. Förg’s point of view was closer to Rodchenko and his contemporaries than the prevailing documentary photography of the time. Make it new meant restoring the potential for surprise, unfamiliar perspective and fascinating detail to these buildings. Förg‘s ease in this handling, the playfulness of his work, ushered the whole modern project into a new era. The pragmatism of the seventies met Förg’s requirement. He did not adopt the occasionally shameless irony of his contemporaries. Instead, his formal decisions relieved modern material without invalidating it. In this way, the work retains a certain warmth or radiance, a kind of “un-expressive” expression. This is especially salient in the four bronze masks from 1994. Since the late 18th century, when Franz Xavier Messerschmidt created his character heads, which can be admired today at the Belvedere in Vienna, sculptors have returned to masks, grotesque deformations of the face, as a consistent motif.

To trace the genealogy of Förg‘s masks, we need not look too far. Förg turns here to Jean Fautrier, whose work he appreciated and paper works he collected. Förg takes on the tragic countenances created by his predecessor and deforms them further. He gives shape to something that oscillates between the ironic, grotesque and reductive – not as possibilities, but as parts in a kind of game. An experiment in inhumane, almost nonhuman, undetermined expression. This is the point of the series. Again, the viewer encounters Förg making it new. What is essential here is that the precedent is not rejected, but redesigned through a dialectical process where the thesis (past models) and the anti-thesis (Förg’s present) are synthesized by Make it new. Postscript Self-portrait as another Curzio Malaparte, born to a German father and a mother from Milan, was a journalist and a poet, a war volunteer and a diplomat, known for his dazzling personality. In 1922, he took part in the Fascist march on Rome, but soon broke with the movement and its associated publications. In 1933, he was banished to the island of Lipari, where he was held for a year. He was a war correspondent, but also a supporter of the Communist Party, as a friend of Palmiro Togliatti. Ultimately, he converted to Catholicism shortly before his death in 1957. His villa was built in the late 1930s at Capo Masullo on Capri by the architect Adalberto Libera and was the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. Curzio Malaparte’s life and career reveals a self-determination that held on to human truths through the turmoil of the 20th century. Malaparte’s novel Kaputt gives a voice to this sense of inner freedom. Förg was fascinated not only by Libera’s architecture, but also by the personality of its proprietor, so that his photographs of the villa become a self-portrait. Translated from German by Camila McHugh

Hermes 2016â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2018 44

Sling I 2018

Capital II 2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2019

Sling II 2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2019 48

Werke / works P. 10 /11 / S. 10 /11 Julian Lethbridge Hermes (Detail) 2018 oil and pigment on linen Öl, Pigment auf Leinen 152,4 x 183 cm 60 x 72 in Page 13 / Seite 13 Julian Lethbridge Roundel 2018 oil and pigment stick on linen Öl und Pigmentstift auf Leinen 183 x 152,5 cm 70 x 60 in Page 14 / Seite 14 Julian Lethbridge Capital I 2018 oil and pigment on linen Öl, Pigment auf Leinen 183 x 152,5 cm 70 x 60 in P. 16/17 / S. 16/17 Günther Förg Masken 1994 Bronze dimensions variable Format variabe

P. 20 / S. 20 Günther Förg Farbfeld 1986 oil and acrylic on plywood Öl und Acryl auf Sperrholz 60 x 200 cm 232/3 x 78 3/4 in

P. 30 / S. 30 Günther Förg Maske IV 1994 Bronze 59,5 x 39,5 x 39,5 cm 23 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in

P. 25 / S. 25 Günther Förg Maske I 1994 Bronze 60 x 40 x 40 cm 232/3 x 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in

P. 35 / S. 35 Günther Förg Sturz II 1984 b/w photograph Schwarz-Weiß Foto 180 x 120 cm 70 3/4 x 47 1/4 in

P. 26 / S. 26 Günther Förg Maske II 1994 Bronze 64 x 39,5 x 39,5 cm 251/4 x 15 1/2 x 15 1/2 in

P. 36 / S. 36 Günther Förg Ohne Titel / Untitled 1986 Bronze 122 x 70 x 7 cm 48 x 27 1/2 x 2 3/4 in

P. 29/ S. 29 Günther Förg Maske III 1994 Bronze 61,5 x 39,5 x 39,5 cm 241/4 x 15 1/2 x 15 1/2 in

P. 20 / S. 20 Günther Förg Farbfeld (Detail) 1986 oil and acrylic on plywood Öl und Acryl auf Sperrholz 60 x 200 cm 232/3 x 78 3/4 in

P. 44 /45 / S. 44 /45 Julian Lethbridge Hermes 2016–2018 oil and pigment stick on linen Öl und Pigmentstift auf Leinen 152,4 x 183 cm 60 x 72 in

Page 48 /49 / Seite 48 /49 Julian Lethbridge Sling II 2018–2019 oil and pigment stick on linen Öl und Pigmentstift auf Leinen 190,5 x 228,6 cm 75 x 90 in

Page 46 / Seite 46 Julian Lethbridge Sling I 2018 oil and pigment stick on linen Öl, Pigmentstift auf Leinen 228,5 x 190.5 cm 90 x 75 in Page 47 / Seite 47 Julian Lethbridge Capital II 2018–2019 oil and pigment stick on linen Öl und Pigmentstift auf Leinen 228,5 x 190,5 cm 90 x 75 in

CFA This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Günther Förg Julian Lethbridge Ballad of a Thin Man 23 March – 20 April 2019 Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

Contemporary Fine Arts Grolmanstraße 32/33 10623 Berlin, Germany Tel. +49 (0) 30-88 77 71 67 www.cfa-berlin.com gallery@cfa-berlin.de © 2019 Contemporary Fine Arts, the authors and photographers Coordination Camila McHugh Texts Louisa Elderton Siegfried Gohr Design Imke Wagener Photography Jochen Littkemann Matthias Kolb Portraits Franziska Messner-Rast (Förg) ULAE, New York (Lethbridge)

CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS BERLIN 2019