Katharina Grosse ranks among the most prominent painters of contemporary international abstraction. Her early artistic endeavors were rooted in the Neo-Expressionism of the so-called “Young Wild Artists”. By the mid-1980s, however, Grosse had increasingly abandoned figurative art. After a series of vibrant paintings characterized by striking pigment patches in the first half of the 1990s, she began to create more subtle color compositions with a glazed effect. Broad brushstrokes running along the axes of the canvas define these works, bringing her large-scale pieces in particular closer to American Color Field Painting, such as that of Barnett Newman.
In 1998, Katharina Grosse also discovered the spray gun as an artistic tool, which has since played a central role in her work and is sometimes used directly in relation to architecture. Since the turn of the millennium, she has increasingly worked with parallel lines that—like other traces of color and color fields—cover not only canvases but also, to a growing extent, physical objects.
This expansion of painting beyond the traditional picture plane and the active incorporation of space are characteristic of many of the artist’s works. In this way, Grosse consistently explores the possibilities of non-representational painting and transforms entire spaces into complex worlds of color. Against this backdrop, the individual painting—including the early work presented here—appears as a fragment of a larger chromatic context. The color fields—dark blue, vivid red, blue-green, and bright grass green—which clash in intense contrast, create an impression that the traces of color could extend beyond the picture’s boundaries and into the space itself, thanks to a dynamic application that flows across the surface. This conceptual idea finds concrete realization in Grosse’s later, spatial works, which
often take on the character of ephemeral installations: entire rooms and objects are connected by color and fused into a new, symbiotic unity. Nevertheless, the traditional canvas remains an important component of her work. Since 2007, for example, she has created canvases with earthy, crust-like surfaces as well as dynamic, abstract works on paper.
As a result, Katharina Grosse has held a permanent place in the international art world since the 1990s. Worldwide solo exhibitions offer a comprehensive overview of her multifaceted and broad oeuvre, while simultaneously demonstrating how this exceptional artist continually pushes the boundaries of the medium and redefines its possibilities. [AW]