One of the most important painters of today, Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is internationally recognised for her bold, haptic paintings and saturated use of colour. Since the late 1990s, Grosse has employed a spraying technique to attack, redefine and subvert traditional notions of painting. Her kaleidoscopic vision spills into the physical world, sweeping across walls, floors, ceilings, everyday objects and sculptural structures. Through this radical inclusion of space as a field of action, the artist achieves a paradoxical clash of the expansion of colour with our material existence. Tracing the artist’s thought process or gaze, colour takes on a lifeforce of its own.
Parallel to her in-situ works, the artist continues to pursue her studio paintings. In her most recent canvases, vibrant loops of colour float, almost three-dimensionally, over white ground. As the colours intertwine like loose strands of thread, the paintings record Grosse’s ongoing reflections on density and velocity. Such works present a radical compression of movement and colour, creating the largest amount of action and entertainment possible over the smallest amount of surface.
‘Paint as materiality and color as immediate chromaticity; raw industrial paints; complex layers of color and their various factual and optical entanglements; the use of stencils; the expansion of the painting beyond the boundaries of the canvas – these are some of the most significant methods through which Grosse creates structural openness but also startling fissures and ruptures. Rooted in process and experiment, chance and control, Grosse’s paintings frequently hover between form and dissolution of form and the liminal spaces in between, evoking perceptual uncertainties that are immersive and distracting at once. Ultimately, her paintings remain hermetic, resisting translation into language and narration.’
S. Eckmann, ‘Introduction’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, and travelling; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022, p. 13
