Gunther Forg

“Once a week, on a Sunday, Austria still existed,” Joseph Roth writes in The Radetzky March, toward the end of the novel when the Sarajevo assassination is announced at a party where Trotta is already drunk, and WWI is a-coming.

If a T86 assault rifle falls in the forest and no one is around does it make a sound?

Gunther Forg (1952-2013), German, was a great experimenter, a classic modernist who investigated abstraction for all the freedoms that could be extracted from abstraction. Painter, sculptor, photographer, designer etc etc—a poly-media artist—whose paintings can be relied on, in quietly meaningful ways, to disrupt my thought pattern just enough to cause me to believe not only in the existence of beauty once again, but in the power conferred upon me through art to escape the social and political castes I might otherwise believe myself condemned to: at least this is what I take from many of the paintings Forg made in the 1980s and 90s.

I become happy when looking at Forg’s paintings, a happiness that lasts at least as long as one whole news cycle, (during which I am once again informed that I did not win a Nobel Prize). I simply look at the paintings, one after another, 2 or 3 of them, not lingering, as lingering is a form of worry, and not thinking either of curation or of survival—or the new type of Man that will have to be created to survive this next age, the one we are now entering, when we will have fully unlocked the DNA sequencing code that will permit us to create both our friends and our enemies in our own image and likeness…

Once a week, on a Sunday, America still exists. How does that sound? Like a tree falling.