Katharina Grosse's colorful paintings and monumentalroom installations have been an integral part of the German and now international contemporary art world since the 1990s. The works are part of important international collections, e.g. the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, the Arken Museum for Modern Art in Copenhagen, the FNAC (Fonds national d'art contemporain) and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas .
Grosse is considered a "master of color effects" (Focus online). She devotes herself to her discipline both on the flat surface and in the three-dimensional space, and in doing so repeatedly exceeds the limits of the traditional concept of painting. Not only are the image carriers she chooses unconventional - both fabric constructions, various objects, floors, sand and heaps of earth as well as lawns, walls and facades are covered with her art - also through the paint application with the spray gun, which Grosse has been using since the late 1990s the artist thus dispenses with the usual painting and manual work with brush and spatula. The spray gun enables her to take a certain distance from the picture carrier in the creative process and thus to build up a completely new relationship to the work of art that is currently being created, and of course leads to significant changes, further developments and new discoveries in her work in the years that follow.
The work offered here is a successful symbiosis of classic painting applied to the canvas with a broad brush and the application of paint with the spray gun, which Grosse now favors. The complexity of the image composition is in no way inferior to the complexity of her sprawling room installations. The linear uniformity of the intersecting light and underlying red color stripes is achieved through sprayed color formations, which the artist provides with the help of earth with a grainy, raised, haptically attractive surface structure. In contrast to the warm-toned background, the organic-looking surfaces, which are kept in intense, cool colors, also come to the fore due to their special materiality, where, when the light falls in a special way, they compete with the whitish color stripes of the background, which suddenly shimmer like mother-of-pearl, even gleaming golden. The sprayed nests of color seem to be floating in another sphere; they cannot be held in place by the picture carrier, but waft into the room in their lightness and weightlessness like shapeless colored soap bubbles. Once again it is "unmistakable that Katharina Grosse not only ventures into space with her abstraction and conquers it in a previously unknown way, but also explores this within the possibilities of the two-dimensional. She takes the viewer with her into the painting processes, into the experience of spatial feelings [..]." (Helmut Friedel, in: Exhib. cat. Katharina Grosse, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden 2016, p. 88). [CH]