Katharina Grosse, Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle

Katharina Grosse is among the present day’s most important female artists. Her painted works captivate viewers with their power and chromatic intensity. Like the proverbial “savage mind,” Grosse is experimental and unpredictable in her thinking. Expansion and continual transgression, freedom and autonomy represent the main pillars of this oeuvre.

The artist, who lives and works in Berlin and in New Zealand, frequently goes beyond classic canvas formats: her paintings, assemblages, and installations in their respective spaces emphasize and characterize said spaces, drawing on their respective genii loci. Katharina Grosse’s vibrating fields of color extend across entire architectures, objects, and large spaces in the public realm. Surfaces are folded and protrude into the third dimension, with the artist making liberal use of a compressor-driven airbrush in order to accomplish fine chromatic mists, hard transitions, and subtly shifting hues. Light and shadow serve to amplify her images.

For the painterly realization of the designs that Grosse is developing for the ALBERTINA Museum’s Columned Hall, an important feature is her transcendence of the “white cube” along with her approach to addressing architectural history by way of expanded painting. In this way, the artist is creating walk-in images for the Columned Hall, as well, images that will spread out over the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and into the space itself, allowing an immediate experience of art. By breaking with the classic museum gallery, Grosse seeks both to create surfaces of aesthetic friction and to shake up accustomed ways of seeing. The public will experience a pulsating, three-dimensional pictorial world that involves the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. In the ALBERTINA Museum, as in other cases, the new artwork will be created onsite in the Columned Hall and hence be visible and perceptible— not to mention walkable—for this exhibition only.

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