Arttable | Artnet Feat. Katharina Grosse
NEW YORK | Artist Breakfast Featuring Katharina Grosse
In this exhibition, selected works from several interconnected suites of untitled paintings produced during the last twelve months demonstrate this constant interaction of process and material. Base shapes migrate from one painting to another, appearing in new layers or fusing into clusters that advance and retreat. The paintings record Grosse’s ongoing choices about color, density, and velocity. In one group, monadic forms proclaim their specific hues within larger zones of color. A red shape takes its place amidst expressive jewel-toned streaks. A plane of cerulean blue opens, or perhaps closes, to a black and yellow void. In other more complex orchestrations, these coloristic moments become so compelling that the canvas, which supports it all, is easily forgotten.
A recent cast metal sculpture sprawls across the floor, its torqued and rippled surface hosting overlapping sprays and drips. White space splices through encrusted abstraction and fluid propulsions refute the boundaries of each plane. Between driftwood and space junk, the sculpture transforms as one moves around its smooth crests and sharp-edged cavities. Grosse compresses the natural, the industrial, and the technological, generating fields of color that hover between three and four dimensions.
Katharina Grosse is a contemporary German painter known for her brightly colored acrylic paintings and installations. Made with an industrial air brush and mounds of pigmented dirt, her work attempts to create a bodily, psychedelic-like experience for the viewer in which they are submerged in a world of color and mood, rather than merely being a bystander looking in. “The painting process is a curious coincidence of thinking and acting,” she has said. “It is the continuous flux of visual intelligence constituting reality in every moment. Aggression is the energy that enables you to bear the loss of what has to go. It feeds and sustains that process.” Born on October 2, 1961 in Freiburg, Germany, she went on to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she now serves as a professor. Grosse’s works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthaus in Zürich, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. She lives and works between Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany.
Louise Neri is an editor, curator, writer, and cultural consultant based in New York. Since 2006, she has been a senior international director at Gagosian, working across Gagosian's extensive global platform on exhibition planning and programming; press, communications and public relations; editorial and publications, research and development, artist acquisitions, museum and private sales, collections consultancy, and new business opportunities.
Recent gallery exhibitions with published catalogues include artists Katharina Grosse, Andreas Gursky, Karin Kneffel, Yayoi Kusama, Taryn Simon, Tatiana Trouve, Adriana Varejao; jeweller Victoire de Castellane and industrial designer Marc Newson.