Kunstmuseum Bonn:

Katharina Grosse is internationally renowned for her expansive spray works, which she carries out on location and which often incorporate the outdoor space. Until now, however, less attention has been paid to her canvas works created in the studio. This exhibition is the first comprehensive exploration of this part of Grosse’s oeuvre, from her earliest paintings in the late 1980s to her most recent works. In particular, it examines their physical and optical properties, their aesthetic complexity and their decidedly dynamic potential.
Katharina Grosse’s large-format and immensely powerful paintings create a heightened sensory perception through their emphatic, material presence. They undermine the conventional relationships between foreground and background, surface and ground, canvas surface and edge and open up new worlds of imagination both inside and outside the artwork. Through an open-ended creative process in which painting takes on the form of a performance, Grosse rethinks fundamental questions that have defined the history of painting.
The exhibition is divided into two major thematic fields: Inventions and Revisions and Ruptures. Inventions and Revisions encompasses a wide range of paintings created since the early 1990s and illustrates the artist’s cyclical working method, in which colors and forms interpenetrate, recur on different canvases and painting grounds, and then transform into new images.
Breaks continues this exploration by focusing on the different methods Grosse uses to break open the medium of painting in order to expand its boundaries. These include the use of stencils, which create empty spaces on the canvas and thus spaces of their own, and the incorporation of natural materials such as earth and branches in a way that reinterprets the usual relationship between art and nature.