HETZLER MARFA is pleased to announce The Super Eight, a solo exhibition of works by Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany). The exhibition consists of seven new works on canvas which Grosse painted in her studio in Aotearoa New Zealand in early 2024, specifically for this presentation.
Katharina Grosse
When forces hit
Over summer, down here, I read the novel Stoneyard Devotional (2023) by Charlotte Woods. The main character is a woman of middle age who has been employed, seemingly at a high-level, doing something we-are-not-quite-sure-what in the environmental sector before she abandons the city and returns to the desert of her youth and enters a retreat, permanently. Out there, time loops in and out between the setting of suns on the long horizon of the desert and the rolling through of longer spells of circling. These pulses of the natural world are marked by her carrying out acts that repeat: sweeping, folding, opening, digging. I read this book while the ache of the water laps in and out of the coastlines near my home. I’m on the phone with Katharina painting in a studio also lapped by water, close to but not quite where I am, because it’s not going to work to do a studio visit. Instead, she invokes the work she is making and I think about this woman leaving, this woman repeating. I think about the desert, Marfa, where you are, where the work is, and the site where this work was made, on the edge of an intense throng of oceanic power at Anawhata.
What is the line we can draw between these two sites, ocean and desert—this arc that traces the form of the world—and the power they hold? It is the kind of power that is not so much about withholding from the other but rather underscoring an infinite possible. The power that connects this deep vast wetness with the expanse of the texture of its opposite is its irrefutability, each a force into and unto itself. Despite so much around us becoming precarious for the sake of “economic infrastructure”, these things, ocean and desert, are infrastructure par excellence. They are whole and not to be interrupted.
Triangulate now. There is an axis of relation that emerges between these sites, ocean and desert—one the site of the doing, the other the site of the showing what has been done—and the movements repeatedly carried out by a body that forcibly does colour onto a ground and then asks you to look. The forcing of colour that begins as an impulse and returns as a repeatable act syphoned through a tube, which meets its double in the mark that appears. Doing colour this way eats it. Colour, form, and choreography metabolise themselves in this process set into motion by this body acting in the way that other bodies might breathe or blink. This is important to consider when we look at the marks that have hit this ground because what we encounter here is not the description of so and so breathing or blinking, but an irrefutable force, into and unto itself. Looping back on themselves, the paintings are not acts of describing something (as I do now), but rather through that breath-blink-eat triple helix, the invitation is to encounter that which is irrevocably live, alive, wild, a thing into and unto itself. Not a tear, or bend, but more like when two forces hit, the force of the wanting and the force of the doing. Metabolised.
In Jane Hirschfield’s poem The Bowl (2014), she describes the number of bones we have in our hands, but also the way our hands can hold a whole world: an ocean and a wave, a desert and speck of dust, the wanting and the doing. What is this world constructed of or towards (and how!) as these forces hit, these uninterruptible things that insist and insist? Colour, impulse, ground, time? When I consider a body doing the work you are viewing, the unrelenting loops that harbour within them an infinite edge that a finger can outline again and again, this work being wrapped and prepared and travelling the many thousands of kilometres they travelled, unwrapped and hung or placed, I am shot to this image of the bowl from Hirschfeld’s poem. The last line of the poem offers a shape to hold the many things contained here in this room with you, ancient lores of painting and paint making, the tools available now, dance, language, the ocean, the speck, and I think of the shape of our world and all the eating, blinking, and insisting to be done, the finger that outlines the edge of a bowl over and over, the figure that picks up the spray-gun over and over, and I think of that last line: “Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.”
Ruth Buchanan, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2024
Ruth Buchanan is an artist living Aotearoa New Zealand and Berlin. She is the currently Kaitohu Director of Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Katharina Grosse (*1961, Freiburg im Breisgau) lives and works in Berlin and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Her recent exhibitions and on-site paintings include Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions at Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024), Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022); Warum Drei Töne Kein Dreieck Bilden, Albertina, Vienna (2023); Canyon (permanent from 2022) and Splinter (2022) both at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Apollo, Apollo, at Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice (collateral event of 59th Venice Biennale, 2022); Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us at HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2021); Shutter Splinter at Helsinki Biennial (2021); Is It You? at Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); It Wasn’t Us at Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart–Berlin (2020); the two-person show Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); chi K11 art space, Guangzhou (2019); The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Meters, Then It Stopped at Carriageworks, Sydney (2018); Wunderbild at National Gallery Prague (2018); Mumbling Mud at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai (2018); Asphalt Air and Hair at ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017); This Drove My Mother Up the Wall at South London Gallery (2017); Katharina Grosse at Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2016); Rockaway for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! programme, Fort Tilden, New York (2016); yes no why later at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); Seven Hours, Eight Rooms, Three Trees at Museum Wiesbaden (2015); Untitled Trumpet for the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and psychylustro for Mural Arts Program Philadelphia (2014).
Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Istanbul Modern; K21–Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe–Muzeul de Artă Recentă, Bucharest; MAXXI–Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum Azman, Jakarta; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Saarland Museum – Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, among others.
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