The present work “Untitled” (1992) was created in an early, pivotal phase of Katharina Grosse’s development and is an impressive testimony to the evolution of her unique painting style. While still a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, from which she graduated in 1990 as a master student of Gotthard Graubner, Grosse laid the conceptual and formal foundations for her later practice of large-scale painting. Today she is internationally renowned for her monumental spray-painted environments, which envelop architecture, objects, and even entire landscapes in expansive swathes of color. The radical expansion of the pictorial space that characterizes these works, however, was already foreshadowed in the early 1990s. Measuring an impressive three meters in width, this painting demonstrates Grosse’s early mastery in unfolding color as both subject and structure. Powerful, dynamic brushstrokes traverse the pictorial surface with an almost choreographic intensity, dissolving any fixed compositional center. Instead, the pictorial space opens up into a seemingly infinite field in which the colors demand their autonomy. There is no up, no down, no hierarchy, only movement, rhythm, and a constantly shifting interplay of nuances. The palette is both immediate and sophisticated: luminous neon yellow meets contrasting azure blue and vibrant red. Their interplay gives rise to rich green tones, vibrant orange, and burnt ochre. The layers of color overlap and permeate each other, allowing deeper tones to shine through, creating a shimmering sense of spatial depth and immediacy. These vibrating shifts highlight Gross’s fundamental experimental approach. As the artist herself explains: “My thinking in terms of process started when I began rearranging the color planes in the painting. For instance, I’d paint orange here and blue and green and yellow there, all with a thick brush. Then I’d remove the orange here and the green there, and then use a bricklayer’s trowel to put the two colors back in the opposite places. I kept on doing that with all the colors until the paint got smudgy [...]. The colors kept changing places, and the more they changed, the more the traces of the changes were visible. That was the first time I had used such an organized process when painting. It made me start thinking in terms of sequences." (Katharina Grosse in conversation with Sabine Eckmann, 2023, cited from: Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2023 Issue). [KA]