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Lot Essay
‘[Painting] is a language, but it isn’t composed like a language … it always forms clusters within itself, since what happens first and what happens last are right on top of each other, making chronology irrelevant’
–Katharina Grosse
Vivid swathes of colour surge across the monumental canvas of Katharina Grosse’s Untitled (2015), creating a billowing complexity of tone, depth and motion. Petrol blues, citric yellows, neon oranges, tropical greens and inky violets sing together in splashes, hazes and looping lines. Soft, blushing transitions meet masked-off edges that in places stand sharply against a flashing ground of white. There is something of the fluid thrill of surfing – one of Grosse’s major passions – in these oscillating, dynamic waves of hue. The magic of painting, Grosse says, lies in its state of flux. As she explains, ‘Movements that have been painted first and last are both simultaneously present on the image field. There is no linear or casual hierarchy of activities in a painting … it requires a mind that is agile and ready to give up an adopted point of view at any moment for the next potential constellation or reading. Everything can become anything at any minute’ (K. Grosse, quoted in E. Wasik, ‘Katharina Grosse Sticks to her Guns’, Interview Magazine, November 2014). Grosse, who has held professorships at both the Kunsthochschule Berlin- Weissensee and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has been described as a ‘philosophical graffiti artist’. She rarely touches a brush. Her painting is instead centred around the industrial spray-gun, which she uses with astounding dexterity and invention on surfaces that range from canvases to walls, floors, sculptures and enormous outdoor murals. Her abstraction stems from the tradition of Colour Field Painting, Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, and her techniques draw influence from practices as diverse as Impressionism, graffiti, performance, process and installation art. Her immense in-situ installations, such as ‘Wunderbild’ at Prague’s National Gallery in 2018, have gained ever-increasing acclaim since the 1990s. Responding to the art of the past, she has forged a fresh visual language that has the power to utterly transform the architectural, spatial and domestic realities of its place of display.
–Katharina Grosse
Vivid swathes of colour surge across the monumental canvas of Katharina Grosse’s Untitled (2015), creating a billowing complexity of tone, depth and motion. Petrol blues, citric yellows, neon oranges, tropical greens and inky violets sing together in splashes, hazes and looping lines. Soft, blushing transitions meet masked-off edges that in places stand sharply against a flashing ground of white. There is something of the fluid thrill of surfing – one of Grosse’s major passions – in these oscillating, dynamic waves of hue. The magic of painting, Grosse says, lies in its state of flux. As she explains, ‘Movements that have been painted first and last are both simultaneously present on the image field. There is no linear or casual hierarchy of activities in a painting … it requires a mind that is agile and ready to give up an adopted point of view at any moment for the next potential constellation or reading. Everything can become anything at any minute’ (K. Grosse, quoted in E. Wasik, ‘Katharina Grosse Sticks to her Guns’, Interview Magazine, November 2014). Grosse, who has held professorships at both the Kunsthochschule Berlin- Weissensee and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has been described as a ‘philosophical graffiti artist’. She rarely touches a brush. Her painting is instead centred around the industrial spray-gun, which she uses with astounding dexterity and invention on surfaces that range from canvases to walls, floors, sculptures and enormous outdoor murals. Her abstraction stems from the tradition of Colour Field Painting, Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, and her techniques draw influence from practices as diverse as Impressionism, graffiti, performance, process and installation art. Her immense in-situ installations, such as ‘Wunderbild’ at Prague’s National Gallery in 2018, have gained ever-increasing acclaim since the 1990s. Responding to the art of the past, she has forged a fresh visual language that has the power to utterly transform the architectural, spatial and domestic realities of its place of display.