Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse sprays the paint colourfully and without any concrete compositional idea, which settles on the picture support as a fine fog of pigments. When the artist begins to work, she does so without any preliminary drawings or sketches. Since 1998, she has distanced herself from tools such as brushes and paint rollers and uses mainly the spray gun as a creative medium.

A master student of Norbert Tadeusz and Gotthard Graubner, her origins lie in traditional colour field painting. Over the years, the artist's oeuvre has developed in a direction that ascribes new meaning and characteristics to painting as an art-historical genre. This paradigm shift, initiated by Grosse, describes her painting as something that stands in relation to something, and that interacts with and is conditioned by its surroundings. By completely dispensing with symbols or references to the representational, she thus focuses on the elementary effect of colours.

Grosses' paintings transcend dimensions and space. Thus her painting is less bound to a classical picture support than to a colour support. In our work from 2006, the artist creates a new pictorial space in acrylic, with horizontal and vertical bands of colour running across the paper. The transparency of the intersecting bands of colour only hints at what lies behind this part of the pictorial structure. The colour palette used here is strongly oriented towards the primary colours.

In addition to colour and dimension, which are central to Grosse's painting, the theme of structure plays a not insignificant role in the artist's oeuvre. Through the different techniques of colour application, the paint reacts with the picture support and covers it in ever new structures. The artist thus not only provides an insight into her artistic process, but also reproduces the moment of interaction.

Fascinated by the boundlessness and the creation of pictorial spaces, her works are aimed less at reproduction and more at perception and scaling by the viewer. Depending on the point of view and perspective, what is perceived varies and is subject to other aesthetic approaches to reception. By selecting particularly atypical image carriers, she challenges the viewer and contributes to viewing the object or art in general with new attention.