Katharina Grosse is one of the great painters of our time and an integral part of the international art world. Born in idyllic Freiburg im Breisgau in 1962, art and culture are part of her everyday life from an early age on. Her mother is an artist herself, her father a professor for German language and literature and later university principal. She studied at the art academies in Düsseldorf and Münster under Norbert Tadeusz and Gotthard Graubner, both artists intensively examined color as the subject of their paintings. Grosse also propagates the maximum freedom and flexibility of color. Her expansive painting can be associated with many things, whether graffiti art, Florentine frescoes, American Color Field Painting, German Expressionism, neon advertising signs, land art or digital aesthetics. But she does not accept any classification and works free of any conventions. Whether she just paints on canvas or makes an entire room the site of her color explosions, her works remain detached and also convey this impression to the viewer. Painting has not been subject to such a radical and consistent development for a long time. It is therefore little surprising that her work is in the world's largest collections, like the Center Georges-Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, to name but a few. In 1998, as part of a contribution to the 11th Sydney Biennale, a compressor-operated spray gun found its way into her work. Since then, a wide variety of works have been created that use illusion to change the reality of the two- or three-dimensional world. If you stand in front of our painting from 2010, the shimmer varies from gold to bronze to rosé, depending on the incidence of light. The color flows across the canvas and seems to push beyond the edges of the canvas like a body of water. Finely sprayed with a paint gun, nests of paint lie above them, seemingly floating. A masterly contrast is created here between different colors and shades, different image levels and a fascinating surface feel. These colored soap bubbles surrounded by a grainy layer of sand evoke a very special aesthetic appeal. The windows appear to have been burned out and open up a new visual world between fire and water. Full of lightness, this work is once again a successful symbiosis of technique, structure, different image levels and free associations the way that only Katharina Grosse does it. [AW]