‘For me, looking at the world has always been connected to doing something in it, on it, or with it at the same time’ – Katharina Grosse
Irreducibly engrossed with the act of painting, Katharina Grosse once asserted that when she paints, she feels like she is at once ‘there and not there’, propelled in a realm devoid of earthly constrictions (Katharina Grosse in conversation with Emily Wasik, 'Katharina Grosse Sticks to Her Guns', Interview Magazine, November 2014, online). Brimming with colour whilst revealing patches of white or unmodulated transitional hues, Grosse’s works often mimic this experience of simultaneous presence and absence. They are at once luxuriously plentiful and enigmatically gestural, making for landscapes of meandering forms that elude any kind of realistic scenery. With its energetic swathes of blue, yellow, green and red, as well as its vacant spaces akin to erasures, Untitled, 2013, is a wonderful example of this phenomenon. It reveals the painterly process with which Grosse evolves, heavily based on a proclivity to embrace events and incidents, and finally celebrating the serendipitous result of it all. The pictorial elements that amount to the final image, she says, function like ‘the residue of my thinking’; they are proof that her art is honest and instinctive, unfolding alongside her gestural impulses (Katharina Grosse in conversation with Emily Wasik, 'Katharina Grosse Sticks to Her Guns', Interview Magazine, November 2014, online). Born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1961, Grosse studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she later became a professor. Her works are housed by such eminent institutions as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Kunsthaus, Zürich, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Works such as Untitled attest to the new aesthetic she has forged and been highly acclaimed for, oscillating between vandalism and philosophical painting. They encapsulate the exciting verve with which she has built her ground-breaking oeuvre.