Katharina Grosse
o. T. (2018)
Few artists in the last 30 years have explored and reimagined the medium of painting with as much color and exuberance as Katharina Grosse. In Grosse’s work, many of the most coveted pieties of what painting is, or what for many it could never be, are challenged in appeals to sensibility and analysis; or, sensibility as analysis. For Grosse, the belief that painting precludes corporeal interaction has been debunked time and again through her trademark installations of pigment and constructions that allow viewers to move and see simultaneously, for the bodily and optical registers to be in permanent dialogue with one another. Grosse’s investigation of the restlessness between the projected and real spaces of painting has also been accomplished on her canvases. In this more classical form, the tension between what we see and what we imagine is negotiated with a stricter adherence to the two-dimensional support as backdrop for Grosse’s choreography of the endless dance between fact and figment. Surface is thus both a material ground and a screen for projection, and in layering, the supposedly stable base of painting can become a virtual house of cards, where we cannot be sure what is on top of what, where things begin and where they end. In Grosse’s Untitled edition, this to and fro is achieved with an intelligence that can only be described as visual. Produced via myriad color inversions, Grosse’s Ditone print reorganizes the entire matrix of her work to assert the permanent play of layered surfaces, both real and imagined.
Ditone Print, 45 x 28.5 cm, edition: 100 + 20 A.P.+ 2 P.P., signed on the front and numbered on the back, € 350.00 plus shipping.