Katharina Grosse has sometimes described her work as exploring the possibility of “painting without painting,” but in fact, her approach is more one of expansion than ­negation: from the paintbrush as extension of the artist’s hand to the industrial sprayer, and from the bounded surface of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Grosse’s works do not so much respond to a particular context as change it, transforming architectures and objects into spaces of painting in a way that is appropriative in its most basic sense of physical seizure or occupation – a strategy that carries unavoidable ­critical connotations in how the artist engages with the institutions that host her work.For her third edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST and on the occasion of the magazine’s 35th anniversary, Grosse has taken a similarly interventionist approach, using back issues as substrates for 35 unique and characteristically colorful and vivid paintings. Splayed open before being painted, these objects can no longer be used in their original function without threatening the stability of the paint on their surfaces. This raises the question of how they should be “read”: As a wry comment on the mutual dependency between art and criticism? As microacts of institutional critique that engage with TZK’s role within the art economy? Or simply as surfaces, whose relationship to the content they conceal is incidental? They thus stand as fitting symbols of the artist’s own ­position: informed by and embedded within arguments around expanded painting, while at the same time standing apart on their own enigmatic terms.