ART-PRESENTATION: Katharina Grosse-Prototypes of Imagination
Through a fusion of painting with architecture and sculpture, Grosse produces a physically immersive experience for the viewer, choosing to work directly onto walls and objects using an industrial spray gun. Her spray painted works enliven surfaces as vast and unorthodox as building exteriors, disused bunkers and massive dirt piles, as intimate as her own bed, bookshelves and clothing, as conventional as a stretched canvas or paper. Her method draws from a combination of art historical traditions, from fresco, plein-air painting, Abstract Expressionism and street graffiti.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
In “Prototypes of Imagination”, her solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery Katharina Grosse reveals the ways in which painting catalyzes the unfolding of multiple dimensions on a single surface. At the center of the exhibition are two paintings of oceanic scale on loose cloth, conceived in direct response to the gallery’s space. Installed in the central space, they hang out from the upper edge of facing walls and spill toward each other across the floor, creating an open path between them for the viewer. Grosse’s gesture is an art of becoming a space. “I’m a painter – the artist confesses – I’m interested in the space generated by the painted image and how it can appear in any kind of existing field, be it architecture or the mundane situations of everyday life. For me, painting isn’t restricted to a canvas or a wall”. According to Grosse, the painting is an unconstrained act of freedom. Her “Wunderbild” (16/2/18-6/1/19) in the National Gallery in Prague is an outburst of pictorial generosity. Registering a gestural moment of image’s appearance, it perceives painting as a processual practice of an extreme resilience and flux, a life itself, a mental and physical preoccupation. Grosse continues this approach in works on stretched canvas, many of which contain rectangular fields that slide and tessellate like the windows and tabs of a browser. These windows also dissolve into each other, and ghostly organic shapes appear within them, forming bright white silhouettes, both visual apertures and obstructions. Spatial tensions rise through shifts in chromatic temperature, and with stencils, folds, and other tools she allows for new patterns to emerge, forming visual records of her decisions, thoughts, and actions. In using stencils to either filter or completely block out areas of negative space, opaque fields are created to be interrupted by solid geometries and ambiguous transparencies. The result recalls photograms wherein individual objects are placed on photosensitive paper to produce images using light alone. Here, paint replaces light, as Grosse saturates the exposed fabric with blazing, spectral mists. Each composition bears intimate traces of its creation, such as the smudges of paint where a stencil has been removed, or showers of drips suddenly severed in their resistance to gravitational pull. Surpassing the limits of pictorial logic, Grosse’s paintings are paradigms of vision; just as forms seem to materialize, their edges effervesce, pulling the viewer into their kaleidoscopic force field.
Info: Gagosian Galley, 6-24 Britannia Street, London, Duration: 16/5-27/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
