Gnther Frg (1952-2013) was a German painter, sculptor, and photographer with an irreverent approach to abstract painting. His paintings on lead became key studies of surface, materiality, and gesture. In the mid-1980s, Frg turned to photography, making portraits and architectural images that document historically and culturally significant buildings throughout Italy and Germany. Gnther Frg: Fragile Beauty surveys about seventy works by the artist, foregrounding painting and incorporating important works in other media. Frg's approach was highly formal and abstract, renewing the romantic utopianism central to the modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, and a sense of nostalgia for that lost vision pervades the work. Featuring beautiful plate photography, the book examines Frg's legacy from a fresh point of view through essays examining Frg's oeuvre in terms of painting, sculpture, architecture, modernism, and the instrumentalization of aesthetics through politics, as well as an illustrated chronology and an insightful conversation with artist Liam Gillick.