Katharina Grosse

Using a paint pistol instead of a brush, Katharina creates large objects, images and spaces that are determined by the direct and sensual effect of colour. The first sprayed works were created at the end of the 1990s and at the same time sketch the crossing of the picture surface into the architectural space.
I find that a picture can land anywhere, on a tree or a piece of stone in the street. A picture can be anywhere, it is so insanely free and unbound by the place, and I am fascinated to try out how impassable the surface can be on which painting can take place. 1)
Thus surfaces of walls, landscapes and objects become the ground for painting - the three-dimensionality becomes the surface.
Chance plays a major role during the process of creation. Bright and garish paint particles are atomized in the air and settle on the painting surface without the artist directing this process. The color-intensive works testify to the influence of American color field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Land Art, and the works of her teacher Gotthard Graubner, with whom she studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The artist, who lives in Berlin and now also teaches at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, dissolves the boundaries of conventional painting and questions the possibilities of the genre so often declared dead in the last century. The roughly carved block of marble shimmers in a variety of colours depending on the view and the incidence of light. Bright orange color particles are superimposed by delicate and sometimes strong purple tones. Elsewhere, green and blue acrylic colours flow into each other, structured by the edges that form the stone. Marble from the quarries of Carrara in northern Tuscany was already used in ancient sculpture. In the Renaissance Michelangelo helped the "white gold" to worldwide fame. However, large areas cover the surface of the marble with their application of colour and thus direct the eye away from the marble surface, which is perceived as being of particularly high quality, to the sculptural qualities of the natural stone in its broken state. The effect of colour, including light and shadow, on the fissured object is of great interest. The acrylic paint applied over the entire surface causes the viewer to decipher the mysterious structure of the superimpositions, the before and behind. The artificial-looking "skirt" illustrates the changeability of materiality through colour and explores the apparent contrasts between naturalness and artificiality, reality and illusion, painting and sculpture, surface and three-dimensionality.

1 Friends of Friends, "Katharina Grosse", Video, Berlin 2014, youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JsPtVXu8gc