Vivid vapours of colour fluoresce across the monumental canvas of Katharina Grosse’s Untitled (1999). Dark greens and hazy magentas are overlaid with a shimmering, airbrushed mist of bright citric yellow, creating a billowing complexity of tone, depth and motion. There is something of the fluid thrill of surfing – one of the artist’s major passions – in these dynamic waves of hue. For Grosse, painting’s magic lies in its state of flux. As she explains, ‘There is no linear or causal 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.
Grosse’s abstraction stems from the traditions of Colour Field Painting, Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, while her techniques draw influence from practices as diverse as Impressionism, graffiti, performance, process and installation art. Her in-situ environments, such as the immense Wunderbild at Prague’s National Gallery in 2018, have gained ever-increasing acclaim since the 1990s. Taking paint to atmospheric new realms, Grosse has forged a fresh visual language that has the power to utterly transform the architectural, spatial and domestic realities of its place of display.
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