Katharina Grosse is considered one of the most important and renowned painters of contemporary abstraction and a master of monumental painting. Beginning with her color field paintings in the 1990s, she has made an important progressive contribution to contemporary art with her artistic creation. At times she is associated with American Color Field Painting, or with neon signs, digital aesthetics or street- and graffiti art. She executes her paintings not only on paper, canvas or other traditional image carriers, but also employs huge fabric constructions, objects, floors, earthworks, lawns, walls and facades. This way she occupies entire rooms and locations, which, through her artistic intervention, are transformed into over-sized installations. With these exuberant color fields that spread out in all directions and even cover the surrounding architecture, the artist has been questioning the conventional definition of the traditional medium of painting for years.
Basically, Grosse‘s painting is always over-painting. This is also very characteristic of the work offered here. The colored circles are superimposed in glazed layers and thus evoke a certain depth. The artist's painting is characteristically designed for expansion: the overlapping, colorful circular formations animate the canvas like soap bubbles billowing through the air. In doing so, they do not obey the limits of their rectangular image carrier. Hardly any of the color circles can be seen as a whole, they seem to press against the edges of the picture enclosing them and growing beyond them, trying to stimulate the observers to complete their cut-off geometric shapes in their minds.
Most recently, Katharina Grosses works were shown at, among others, the Helsinki Biennial at the Helsinki Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, or in the large-scale solo exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, the Hall Art Foundation, Derneburg Castle and the chi K11 art museum in Shanghai. With the freely floating digital sculpture "Number One", the artist released her first NFT edition in September2021, once again delivering proof of her quest to expand the boundaries of the concept of painting. [CH]