Gunther Forg at Barbel Grasslin - Frankfurt, Germany - Review of Exhibitions

Inventiveness is the hallmark of Forg's wide-ranging material substance of work, which zigzags from abstract painting to architectural photography to and zinc reliefs. No purist, Forg likes to mix pieces in different mediums in a single exhibition space and to enjoin solemnly relations between disparate objects. In this exhibit his quirky bronze sculptures, all execut in the past sum of two units years, were accompanied by a locate of 15 scribbled pastel drawings, the kind that nation say a child could do.

Forg might have rummaged end Gray's Anatomy to come up with this miscellany of sculpt material substance parts - torso, hand, knee leg turn His bronzes, all but single charred with a black patina, whimsically oscillate between Easter island primitivism and grecian classicism. Large Torso suggests a sizable chunk of a tree stock rendered into a female form. The surface of this 3 1/2-foot-high work bears the uneven fingermarks of the clay mold from which it was cast. The breasts are like patted-on dirt pies, and there's a patted-on pubic triangle, too. Small Torso II tend hitherwards closer to the sleekness of the classical Western female form; its sundered arm might be a regard to the Venus de Milo.

Forg claims a limitless artistic freedom, cites anyone he feels like, treats single material as if it were another. This uninhibitedness is his greatest in quantity attractive quality. Many of his alloy of coppers are heavily modeled like clay or manically carved up like forest Thin Hand, an elongated hand poised as if to shake the spectator's, drops from Giacometti. Inner Elbow and Leg are limbs of classical musculature; their beauty is undermined, admitting by the violent scoring and pitting of their surfaces. by the agency of taking expressionistic modeling to like an extreme, Forg ends in a kind of parody of his sources.

Many of the untitled pastels exhibit scrawled images of Forg's statuarys caged inside jagged grids. In individual of the most colorful, a messy cross-hatching of lavender, brown and virid frames a torso with fulvous breasts and a purple pubic region. In another, apropos of nothing, there's a pile of what bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to white stones. In the extremity what's most interesting about Forg's work is the quixotic imagination behind it.

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