Katharina Grosse is a leading light in the international contemporary art scene. Her works transcend the traditional boundaries of painting, expanding them into three-dimensional space. “Color is something very intimate. It evokes immediate reactions,” explains the artist, offering a glimpse into her creative process, which often takes on a performative character. She combines unmixed industrial paints to create multi-layered, polychrome compositions in her works. As a result, she creates optical patterns using stencils, cracks, and cuts that radically challenge traditional perceptions of painting. The dynamic application of the paint is a central element of her art, which often expands to include surfaces such as walls, floors, or even exterior facades. This structural openness gives her work an immersive dimension that draws viewers into the color space where the boundary between art and the surrounding environment dissolves.
Alongside spray painting, for which Grosse uses a spray gun as her most distinctive tool, the artist also experiments with natural materials such as soil - an organic element that adds an unpredictable, almost anarchic element to her work. A deliberate choice that allows her to juxtapose the technical precision of the industrial paints with natural textures. Soil as a material carries a physical and metaphorical heaviness that lends Grosse's work an additional dimension and intensifies her artistic engagement with nature. Since the 1990s, Grosse has explored new ways of applying paint. Particularly noteworthy is her use of color as a sculptural element. Whether applied in a glazing manner, in dense, crusty layers or almost transparently like mist, the various textures and aggregate states of color are at the center of her art. At the 1998 Sydney Biennale, Grosse sprayed directly onto architectural structures for the first time, a moment considered a milestone in her artistic development. She later expanded on this technique, for example, in her spectacular installation at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2020/21, where she let layers of color crawl across three-dimensional polystyrene structures, thus connecting the interior and exterior spaces. At this point, her proximity to graffiti art became particularly apparent: the sprayed paint, covering structures with lines and surfaces, is strongly reminiscent of acts of youthful rebellion and the expression of this urban art form. In some of her recent works, Grosse has created a three-dimensional effect by applying sand to the canvas, which she mixed with color pigments. A method that leads to color blocks that seemingly float above a dynamic network of lines. This approach indicates her unusual combination of color and material and her expansion of the pictorial space into new dimensions. The interplay of industrial colors and natural materials such as soil and sand also gives Grosses' large-scale works an uncontrollable, raw energy. This balance between chaos and control, between nature and technology, characterizes Katharina Grosse's art and makes each of her works a complex and dynamic visual experience. [KT]