‘Katharina Grosse has limited her palette to six colours, which were sprayed unmixed onto the canvases. Multiple paintings were made simultaneously; they belong to the same family, but the way the colours mingle differs per painting. Sometimes they are close to each other, a red near a pink, creating a fluid transition. Elsewhere, a yellow is taking the lead, claiming the main part, or there is a deep purple leaving a dark note. Yet the colours never show up alone – in each painting, they are part of a bundle, inseparable in perception. What we see are strings of colours, some of them looping in parallel movement, others entangled or crossing. As a whole, they seem to move, floating or cutting through a white(ish) space. […] Everything in these works revolves around colour and its potential to attach itself to familiar forms but also to dematerialise – remaining present but without a fixed identity.’
J. Benschop, ‘Colour as Such’, in Katharina Grosse, exh. cat., Berlin / Paris / London: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2024
‘[…] Grosse has printed photography onto metal mesh material, which resembles knitted sequins and enshrouds the entire room like an armour. “There is an almost painful beauty to the temporality of my siterelated paintings, given that they usually disappear,” Grosse says. “So I began to collect and study the visual residue of work processes, both on site and in my studios.” Grosse began to print photographic images onto fabrics as part of her practice in 2013: “By transforming these images into large-scale prints on silk, polyester or metal mesh, I was able to obtain a ghostlike photographic presence, which underscores the fleeting quality of the original works.” […] Barely perceptible on the surface of the metallic fabric is a composite printed image of the artist’s hands. These moments explore the link between the mediums of painting and photography, and the ever-present tensions in Grosse’s work between image and body, physicality and illusion. It all evokes an ethereal, fantastical sensation. "This experiment has allowed me to disconnect the photographic from the paradigm of the representational and to link it with the paradigm of presence instead,” Grosse notes.’
C. Jansen, ‘Katharina Grosse’s shimmering, iridescent installation envelops Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice’, in Wallpaper*, 26 April 2022
‘Considering the acute socio-historical moment in the beginning of the twenty-first century – in which nature both disappears in uncanny ways (its residual presence marked, for example, by the removal of a tree branch after the canvas is painted) and takes over (as evoked by the tree branch remaining on the canvas, as if to invade an alien environment) – over- or undertones of the current climate crisis are difficult to avoid when viewing these canvases.’
S. Eckmann, ‘Katharina Grosse: Returns, Revisions, Inventions’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘These slashed relief paintings, baroque in their overload of variously bended canvas sheets, are infused with a degree of inevitable uncertainty and ambiguity, specifically taking into consideration how actual voids and cuts meet vibrant color compositions.’
S. Eckmann, ‘Katharina Grosse: Returns, Revisions, Inventions’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘We have so much imagery in our lives that comes from homogeneous surfaces – from the screen, from photography, from our phones. I think that tactile images, or multilayered images such as painting, provide a different kind of knowledge. I am searching for a painted picture that has bodily contact, that addresses the entire bodily intelligence and can resonate in every fibre of our being. I expand scale to such an extent that my paintings demand physical involvement and movement on the part of the visitors. Site, viewer and work of art become entangled in a relationship of mutual dependency and create an ecosystem. There is no longer a threshold indicating where one starts and the other stops.’
K. Grosse in conversation with A. McNay, ‘Katharina Grosse – interview: “My eyes are my most important tools”’, in studio international, 21 December 2020
‘It becomes obvious that Grosse stretches the boundaries of painting in all directions, not to dissolve them but to explore a broad variety of ways that demonstrate the malleability and potential for transformation of painting within and beyond the medium. Viewing her paintings from the perspective of difference and multiplicity, which challenge hierarchies and fixties, one can see that it is through uniquely painted layers and simultaneities, empty spaces and maximizations, fragmentations and disorientations, that she explores relations, sometimes blurring and entangling them, at other times emphasizing dissonance and conflict, while operating with a formal vocabulary that is undergoing constant change. The paintings connect to the external world in the form of a parallel universe through methods that loosen indexical connections between maker and work and through the ways in which these paintings become actual parts of the everyday. Given these ambiguities and uncertainties, whether the artworks penetrate the real through elemental materials or cut-up canvases or massive reproductions, together they are involved in the continuous process of reconfiguring painting and its impact on relation to experiental reality.’
S. Eckmann, ‘Katharina Grosse: Returns, Revisions, Inventions’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘My assistants and I discuss and plan everything beforehand in detail with the help of different scale models. Many rational and pragmatic decisions are to be made. […] Sometimes misunderstandings lead to better solutions than minutely developed plans. […] Once the physical structures or supports have been installed on site, I join in and start the painting from scratch. The painting decisions are all made on site, according to how my intentions and emotions develop in relation to the given situation, to the multidimensionality of the setup, to the light, to conversations, or to new thoughts for future projects that often occur along the way. The work is not only the material apparition of its presence, but it is the sum of its influences.’
K. Grosse in conversation with A. McNay, ‘Katharina Grosse – interview: “My eyes are my most important tools”,’ in studio international, 21 December 2020
‘What is so problematic with Katharina’s works is understanding how they are made. Which layer was sprayed first and how she has reacted to that layer to continue the process of lying down colours, marks, forms and shapes. The narrative of their making is so hard to determine. By the time I give up and realise I am being messed with, taken for a fool, it’s too late: I have fallen in love with her beautiful process. What is so maddening about Katharina’s work is that I fall for it every time. With every work I’m bowled over, head over heels, smitten, again and again, and again.’
G. Brown, in Katharina Grosse, exh. cat., Berlin / Paris / London: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2024
‘For Wunderbild at the National Gallery in Prague, Grosse took her spray-painting and stencil aesthetic to staggering proportions: two approximately 20 by 50 meter (66 by 167 foot) acrylic on fabric paintings (which she composed in sections) removed from the walls and facing each other on either side of the great hall, with their excess bottom sections spilling onto the floor. These giantsized paintings also functioned as sou walls, and suggested both heater curtains and projection screens. The title, which can be translated as “wonder picture” or “miracle picture”, has distinctly carnivalesque connotations. It also refers to Sigmund Freud’s famous paper on the Wunderblock, a children’s writing toy in which two thin sheets, one celluloid and one waxed paper, upon which to draw or write, cover a wax tablet; when the sheets are removed the writing or drawing mostly disappears, leaving only fait traces on the wax.’
G. Volk, ‘Toward a Carnival Art’, in Katharina Grosse. Contemporary Painters Series, London: Lund Humphries, 2020
‘Wherever Katharina Grosse applies paint to the built environment, whether in a museum or an airport departure hall, on the asphalt of a street or on a historical building, outdoors or inside, she always refers to conventions of coating and marking. At the same time, painting appears independently of the specific place as an act of vandalism, since it covers different objects uniformly or is deposited on surfaces that are not intended to be colored. In that sense, [Katharina Grosse’s] painting is nowhere completely foreign and nowhere completely at home. Wherever her work finds its place, its painterly specificity reclaims its own qualities in contrast to the givens of that place.’
U. Loock, ‘The Painting of Katharina Grosse’, in Katharina Grosse, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2013
‘A stencil also creates a hole; it functions as a gap in the act of painting. Using a stencil is the opposite of smudging. So you get a crack, a fault, and an unconfined space that you can get into from anywhere.’
K. Grosse in conversation with S. Eckmann, ‘All I wanted to do was paint’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘I paint over the border of objects and architectural settings in order to expand the area rather than close it off. I feel borders to be zones of extremely dramatic theatricality, because that is where highly diverse interests overlap, intertwine, and are compelled within a narrow space to engage in competition; to exist in simultaneity. In border areas, we experience mutually exclusive things in an instant, as a paradox. Let's consider the border between water and land – a concept of the border that is quite familiar. What does the ocean mean for me when I come from the land? What does it mean for those who come from the ocean? Borders are spaces of negotiation that have to be created again and again. My works provide models for thinking through border-spaces. How would it be if the borders of objects were not so binding for us? If it were possible for objects to be redefined, to be newly materialised by a constant change of perspective? Would we then not encounter our loved ones, neighbours, strangers, or the community differently?’
K. Grosse in conversation with M. Tai, ‘Katharina Grosse in Conversation’, in Ocula, 3 May 2019
‘If we label Grosse’s work incorrectly, we misunderstand that there is no one speed, shape, ramification, or encounter to painting. The intention, the painting tool, the movement, and the resistance of the surface are together the painting. Not in a metaphysical sense, in a very literal and visible sense. Attune closely to Grosse’s painting: She primarily uses a spray gun, and the distance and diffusion of the tool are always present. One sees when the liquid spray was close and dense enough to saturate, soak, drip, congeal, and also so distant as to lightly graze or lose clear boundary. The distance between her discrete paintings and the building-scales paintings is not a change of method, only a change of surface and its resistance to or acceptance of paint, and most importantly a change of scale.’
A. Elms, ‘Proximity Is What It Is’, in Katharina Grosse. psychylustro, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010
'These in situ pieces, often monumental, employ a pictorial vocabulary identical to the one used by the “mobile” works. this vocabulary encompasses all of the architectural elements at hand – walls, floors, ceilings – to which others are added: rubble, concrete slabs, piles of stones or earth, ovoid or cubic forms, air-filled balloons... this second category produces works that are often quite spectacular due to their monumentality, their ephemeral status and an undeniable performative aspect, concerning the speed of execution and risk-taking inherent in this sort of creation. Viewing an in situ work by Katharina Grosse is both a visual and physical experience, as a matter of fact, one does not see her works: one enters them, challenges them, measures oneself against them. the viewer undergoes a pictorial immersion, overwhelmed by a layout of colors that are sublime and dirty, strident and apocalyptic. Walls, floor and ceilings fuse into a pictorial entity that tends to force the site’s spatial dimensions through the triple action of color, violence and gaseous atmosphere. These pictorial environments oust illusionist effects, toppling the traditional idea that requires a wall painting to be organized in function of its architectural support; they stand on blurry grounds, wavering between crass beauty and ornamental vandalism.’
J. Fautrier, ‘Crass Beauty’, in SKROW NO REPAP, exh. cat., FRAC Auvergne, Auvergne; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007
‘From Grosse’s single-layered figurations to her multilayered sedimentations, which are virtually opaque, the properties of the materials and their idiosyncratic makeup are not merely accepted as part of the process of production but consciously invited and provoked: mixtures and smearings resulting from the overlapping of transparent lines and swaths of paint as well as the bleeding of the paint in rivulets that trickle down the canvas. These rivulets may form inside a shape or may run down from the edges of the stencils, where the paint collects, once they are removed. Other techniques result in the appearance of residues of soil formations that were distributed across the horizontal canvas.’
U. Wilmes, ‘Deep Fields’, in Eat, Child, Eat!, Berlin: Distanz Verlag, 2011
‘The five-mile stretch of railroad track that slices through some of Philadelphia’s most impoverished areas along the Northeast Corridor is dispiriting. It encompasses a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and buildings missing walls and roofs, neglected neighborhoods and graffiti-strewn passageways. Since mid-May, though, the area has been home to (and a scene on view for train commuters) a Christo-esque installation of seven enormous works of art by the Berlin-based visual artist Katharina Grosse, titled “psychylustro.” […] Planned obsolescence is an integral part of “psychylustro.” Ms. Grosse used Benjamin Moore house paint, unprotected by sealant, that will gradually wear off, and the installation will be maintained against graffiti (which has already begun to appear on the walls) only for the first six months. After that, it will be at the mercy of the graffiti artists and the weather. Ms. Grosse’s work will soon erode, leaving streaks of color that will eventually demand no attention whatsoever from passengers on their daily commutes.’
N. McShane Wulfhart, ‘Bright Passages Along the Northeast Corridor’, in The New York Times, 24 July 2014
‘For many years, Katharina Grosse has been using piles of earth – smaller and larger mounds – in her colorful, total installations. Initially it seemed the piles were just one part of an overarching ensemble and a kind of self-reference to the source of the pigment, but gradually they have developed into formations that visitors can walk on.’
P. Kaiser, ‘Expansive Formations’, in Katharina Grosse. Inside the Speaker, exh. cat., Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; Cologne, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010
‘Since 2008, Grosse has used numerous and contradictory layers of paint on individual canvases, achieving a concentration of pictorial form and spatial painting which encompasses various objects, the interaction of positive and negative, and the condensing of different temporal elements in one place. While the canvas is sharply limited by its edges, the painting virtually moves across and beyond these, in turn being crisscrossed by them in the form of cuts, lines, and contours. In this sense, the edges of the canvas are only a possible, temporary, and non-binding limitation of painting.’
U. Loock, ‘Dividing Lines‘, in Katharina Grosse. Inside the Speaker, exh. cat., Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Cologne, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010
‘One of Grosse’s most important works at the interface of image and real space was the work she produced for the Kunstmuseum Bonn, In Seven Days Time, which followed, and some extent was based on, her 2009 Shadowbox exhibition at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin. In that exhibition Grosse showed four large, curved, partly perforated, spay-painted ellipses made out of laminated hard foam. […] By protruding into space, In Seven Days Time establishes its own realm of reality without assuming the status of a sculpture. What appears here is in a sense the greatest possible expansion of pictoriality, while the fragmentary form makes clear that the work is once again only part of a larger context that can no longer be conceived in its entirety.’
S. Berg, ‘The Freedom of Uncertain Places’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘Entering Katharina Grosse’s ecology of colors is like experiencing our Earthly environments with sudden awareness of how we are a part of a world of colors, light, and forms – including dirt and soil – that shift with our perspectives and actions. We are not managers or masters of control and containment when it comes to the environment generally, and to the ecology of colors specifically; instead, we engage light and color as participants in the world, a world that we are changing blindly with our irresponsible exploitation of the Earth and its natural resources. Katharina Grosse helps us experience this materiality and so to sense and see, vividly and in morphological delight or shock, the tones of aggressively polluted sunsets and darkly invasive species in the stunning hues of our living world which we co-create with solar radiation and other beings.’
H. I. Sullivan, ‘The Ecology of Colors: Katharina Grosse’, in Katharina Grosse. It Wasn‘t Us, exh. cat., Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020
‘The encounter with Katharina Grosse’s artwork is always launched with a whiff of intense chromaticism. Her industrial acrylics, sometimes verging on fluorescence, create ambiguous pictorial surfaces. While these surfaces are marked by alluring aestheticism, they also convey a systematic contradiction of this color-fascination by way of colorimetric tuning, which is strident, dissonant. It sprouts “at the core,” pierced with multiple intensities that sometimes clash. It crystallizes through forceful lines and composite streams. It incites sampling of German expressionism and the decorative force of Renaissance frescos; it blends the spray-technique, already used by Jules Olitski, Dan Christensen or Hans Hartung and Martin Barré in the 1960s, with the technique of projecting negative images onto cave walls; it mixes the harsh beauty of Turner’s colorful steam with the most voracious mildew-tones. It beckons to the grand history of painting, to pictorial graffiti jargon, as well as to an excessive form of Bad painting. it magnifies locations while compelling their devastation; it sprouts “at the core” of art and architecture, at the core of painting and a certain kind of politics. at the end of the day, Katharina Grosse derives her sources not so much from an American history of painting as from a European tradition of color and its explosive power, with Delacroix at its helm. Katharina Grosse’s paintings are brimming with an impulsive color-vitality, blazing material that locates its violence in unnatural color schemes that create the surface.’
J. Fautrier, ‘Crass Beauty’, in SKROW NO REPAP, exh. cat., FRAC Auvergne, Auvergne; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007
‘Grosse used irregularly sized stripes of color with a diagonal orientation, layered like grids on the canvas. Yet she also undermined the virtual detachment of the pictorial figure from the background by spreading her footprints across the entire picture – a special shoe made the impressions irregularly rounded and hard to identify. They penetrate the individual stripes of color, show the stratification of the painting, and connect the separate layers like snaps on an article of clothing. The impression is that a plethora of stopping points prevent the painting from gliding out over its edges.’
U. Loock, ‘Dividing Lines‘, in Katharina Grosse. Inside the Speaker, exh. cat., Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Cologne, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010
‘From the beginning of her artistic practice, and in contrast to the figurative canvases that dominated the art world at the Ume, Grosse began creating a painterly vocabulary of abstract forms, employing and testing specific paints and applications and using certain colors and combinations that would return transmuted – sometimes in subtle, sometimes in radical ways – such as when she began using a compressor-driven spraying technique in 1998, or began employing stencils in the 2010s, to establish new painterly inventions. We encounter horizontal color bands as well as vertical ones. Some are strictly rectilinear, while others have organic and irregular shapes and are curvilinear. The paint is applied in various thicknesses; some coatings are more transparent, others more opaque. These strokes of color are applied in layers, visualizing relations between above and beneath that are visible at once and often appear indistinct. Through this method of interlocking layers, Grosse calls into question the common ordered relation between foreground and background, figure and ground, as typically articulated in a conventional painting.’
S. Eckmann, ‘Katharina Grosse: Returns, Revisions, Inventions’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘One flagrant act of [Katharina Grosse’s] vandalism is painting over her own bedroom, which she will later restage in the context of the painting’s differential relationships to architecture, objects of furniture, and materials. This singular act is flagrant not because of the esthetic quality of painting, which is not essentially different from other works, but because the artist is thus placing in reality the occupation of her own bed with colored material in lieu of the possibility of withdrawing to this bed. In this case, painting over results in a real-world uselessness that affects the author of this painting herself. In this extreme, it represents [Katharina Grosse’s] self-exile.’
U. Loock, ‘The Painting of Katharina Grosse’, in Katharina Grosse, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2013
‘In other paintings […], the wider bands of color of the more transparent paintings connect with the ones in which individual layers are barely discernible. The elaborate web of thin curved lines in this work, which at first glance resembles vibrating Op artworks, offers us glimpses both into the picture ground and of the entanglements of paint coats that animate the surface of the canvas and the spaces beyond its edges. What these intricate contacts and interactions between above and below, front and back, and in between have in common is that they offer new possibilities to visually experience a painted structure from within, deliberately transgressing the Western canon’s long-established conventions of vertical hierarchies.’
S. Eckmann, ‘Katharina Grosse: Returns, Revisions, Inventions’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘From Bern to Marfa to Venice and beyond, Grosse’s paint – stretching outside of gallery spaces to fill streets, parks, subway stations, and abandoned structures, and covering all manner of natural, found, and constructed components – is resolutely, intensely, adamantly there, and can only be truly experienced through direct, most often ambulatory, encounter.’
G. Bader, ‘Platform Economies: Katharina Grosse in the Digital Age’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
‘I always prefer colors out of the can for their rawness. I don’t, in fact, work with many colors. I use between thirty and forty that are, in the end, a couple of yellows, a couple of greens, a couple of blues, couple of reds – transparent and opaque, cold and warm. What I use the color for – apart from responding to my moods, to my sense of absurdity and lushness and exuberance – is being able to see my thinking. I paint a blue into a yellow. I can clearly see what I am doing. I can see how I move in the space. It is the trace of my thoughts and my strategic moves for myself. It therefore has a lot of different functions.’
K. Grosse in conversation with P. Bui, ‘Katharina Grosse with Phong Bui,’ in The Brooklyn Rail, 1 March 2017
‘In 1998, as guest artist at the Bern Kunsthalle, Katharina Grosse embarked on a creative process that she has never leu since: spraying pure color with a gun attached to a compressor pressurized at 3 bars, discharging 270 liters of air per minute. these technical details, seemingly secondary, actually give us insight into how dependent this practice is upon the artist’s “mechanically” extended hand. This first spray-work […] , done with no draft or sketch, was carried out by projecting dark green acrylic on the two corner walls and ceiling of an exhibition space at the Kunsthalle, right where a certain Russian might have displayed one of the very first abstract icons in art history... This inverted and vandal icon, atomized at high pressure and sprayed with more or less force, covered the walls and ceiling in variable densities, in color-clouds that exposed each gesture. The corner of the exhibition space showing the artist’s first spray-work was literally flattened, its depth eliminated, its architecture as if vanished. This simple and radical painting laid the foundations of the artist’ssubsequent works in various art spaces – museums, art centers, galleries – as well as in more unexpected sites. [Untitled] used the location’s architecture but not as a pivot for ist structure: it rather absorbed the architecture and visually toppled and rolled it. The works of the following years juxtapose mental paint-experimentation with an ensemble of architectural situations, aiming in the footsteps of [Untitled] to roll up the space, to twist it, to shatter or unify it, to magnify or wreck it, to pierce it or else to eradicate its depth.’
J. Fautrier, ‘Crass Beauty’, in SKROW NO REPAP, exh. cat., FRAC Auvergne, Auvergne; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007
‘In the second half of the 1990s, Grosse made her painting into a simple practice of placing paint on a support while avoiding compositional measures. In this regard, she followed in the lineage that turned against the sublimation of color in abstract expressionism, holding rather to its factual qualities, a lineage that extends as far as Blinky Palermo’s materialization of painting in Stoffbilder (Cloth Pictures), objects, and wall paintings. […] The paint was applied with disUnct brushstrokes placed next to each other, through which the ground shimmered; fields of such brushstrokes in various colors were combined; mixtures resulted from the superimposition of zones with different colors. […] Grosse painted on large paper and canvas formats, hung loosely and on occasion adapted to the particular architecture; […] she covered entire walls with color. Placed next to one another, overlapping, or layered horizontally or vertically, the brushstrokes formed available elements of an inventory that could be transferred from one support to another. Yet the horizontal and vertical orientation of the brushstrokes always corresponded to the rectangular format of the underlying support, be it a stretched canvas or the surface of a wall.’
U. Loock, ‘Dividing Lines‘, in Katharina Grosse. Inside the Speaker, exh. cat., Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; Cologne, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010
‘Grosse explored the effects of color as a meaning-generating element, their ability to arouse sensually and to deceive. She understands her own practice as an exploration of what each color could mean, of the extent to which we, in our perception of art, and she, when painting, seek only what is known or, on the contrary, are open for the unknown, and of the extent to which what is known is based on familiar appearances or the familiar responses that it generates – ultimately, all aspects of painting performance and performativity of color.’
K. Bühler, ‘Performing Painting’, in Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings 1988–2022, exh. cat., Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2022
All works: Katharina Grosse © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024