Katharina Grosse is one of the most influential figures in international contemporary art. Her creative practice is characterized by a radical exploration of painting's expressive potential and a consistent transgression of the traditional painting surface. For almost three decades, Grosse has been unwaveringly exploring the boundaries between color, space, and perception, repeatedly breaking the limits of our preconceived notions of painting.
Trained at the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she would become a professor herself, Grosse emerged in the early 1990s with an unmistakable visual language, and her work has been displayed in museums and institutions worldwide ever since. Among the most remarkable artistic statements, we find the spectacular project “It Wasn't Us” (2020) at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in which massive color structures spread out from the museum into the public space, radically questioning the conventional distinction between the museum and the urban context.
Irrespective of the medium – canvas, buildings, or a natural environment – Grosse conceives painting not as an illusionistic pictorial space but as an immediate intervention in reality. Her works take shape as spatial events, as energetic gestures in the present moment. Speaking about her artistic intention, Grosse says: “Reality can always be seen and experienced differently. [...] Everything is an image. Everything is an idea. My images are prototypes of this realization.” (Katharina Grosse, 2018, quoted from Sabine Eckmann, Katharina Grosse. Studio Paintings 1988-2022, Berlin/St. Louis 2022, p. 206).
While Grosse has been working increasingly with large-format spray techniques since 1998, the work “Untitled” from 2005 allows a rare insight into another physically direct dimension of her artistic process. The shiny, colorful circles move in rhythm, overlapping in dense, polychrome layers and revealing traces of the gestural process, like choreographic notations. Even individual brush hairs left behind on the canvas bear witness to the artist's physical presence. The tondos seem anything but closed: they vibrate and expand as if they want to overcome the image size. The central dialectic in Grosse's work – a balancing act between conscious placement and radical openness – is revealed in this dynamic tension between formal structure and the dissolution of boundaries through painting. [KA]