Background
Katharina Grosse was born on October 2, 1961, in Freiburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany to the family of a germanist Siegfried Adolf Eduard Grosse and an artist Barbara Grosse.
Münster Academy of Art, Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Katharina Grosse studied at Münster Academy of Art under Norbert Tadeusz.
Düsseldorf Academy of Art, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Katharina Grosse studied at Düsseldorf Academy of Art under Gotthard Graubner.
Münster Academy of Art, Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Katharina Grosse studied at Münster Academy of Art under Norbert Tadeusz.
Düsseldorf Academy of Art, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Katharina Grosse studied at Düsseldorf Academy of Art under Gotthard Graubner.
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Katharina Grosse was born on October 2, 1961, in Freiburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany to the family of a germanist Siegfried Adolf Eduard Grosse and an artist Barbara Grosse.
Katharina Grosse studied at the Münster Academy of Art and the Düsseldorf Academy of Art under Norbert Tadeusz and Gotthard Graubner.
Katharina Grosse is a contemporary German painter known for her brightly colored acrylic paintings and installations. Made with an industrial airbrush and mounds of pigmented dirt, her work attempts to create a bodily, psychedelic-like experience for the viewer in which they are submerged in a world of color and mood, rather than merely being a bystander looking in.
In Grosse's works on canvas from the 1990s, she juxtaposed colors of various densities and temperatures, repeating vertical, transparent brushstrokes. These led to related works painted directly onto the wall, where she lined hallways and staircases in sublime fields of artificial color. Introducing the spray gun as a painting tool, she began to paint across architectural interiors and exteriors. She produced her first work, a monochrome, using this technique at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1998, spray painting the upper corner of a gallery in a deep green that spread partially down two adjacent walls and onto the ceiling. In 2000 Grosse became a professor at the Art Academy Berlin-Weissensee; and she taught the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 2010–2018.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Grosse combined the intersecting streaks of previous works with the cloud-like forms and mists made possible by the spray gun. The in situ paintings expanded in scale as she explored the liquidity and vast reach of the medium. In 2004, at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, she sprayed the gallery interior along with clothing, papers, eggs, and coins scattered across the floor; and in 2005, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, she hung two huge canvases on the wall: one already painted, and one blank. She painted the latter on site, as well as the wall on which it hung. She then took down the painted canvas and leaned it against the wall on the floor, leaving a blank white rectangle.
For Grosse, there are no distinctions between painting, sculpture, and architecture. In addition to painting on canvases and over found materials like buildings and trees she also creates large polyurethane, Styrofoam, and cast-metal sculptures that act as abstract armatures for her paintings. Her in situ painting Untitled Trumpet was included in the Biennale di Venezia, in 2015, and Museum Wiesbaden, Germany, presented a major survey of her works on paper that same year. In 2016, adding to a sequence of significant public commissions in the United States, she created a work for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series at Fort Tilden in the Rockaways, New York, transforming a derelict aquatics center with sprays of red, white, and magenta. The following year, Gagosian presented Grosse’s first solo exhibition in New York, featuring major works from several interconnected suites of paintings, and one cast-metal sculpture. In these canvases, monadic forms migrate from one painting to another, appearing in new layers or fusing into clusters that advance and retreat. The paintings record Grosse’s ongoing reflections on color, density, and velocity, as well as her use of stencils, applied directly to the surface throughout the painting process.
In Grosse's most recent site-responsive paintings, Grosse has incorporated lengths of painted fabric, draped from the ceiling and spilling onto the floor, thus adding even more dimensionality to her immersive paintings. The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped (2018) for Carriageworks, Sydney, was comprised of more than 27,000 square feet of suspended fabric, draped, knotted and folded across and through the nineteenth-century industrial architecture of the building. In Wunderbild (2018), for the National Gallery in Prague, Grosse produced an imposing enfilade of paintings on loose cloth, draped from the walls on two sides. Painted on the floor of her Berlin studio, Wunderbild creates a bridge between Grosse’s studio canvases and in situ paintings, and its aqueous fields of color are punctuated by white palimpsests of negative space. This development continued in Prototypes of Imagination, Gagosian Britannia Street (2018), in which an entire wall of the gallery was covered by a sheet of painted fabric, asserting new spatial and temporal transformations.
Katharina Grosse lives and works between Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany.
Katharina Grosse is an internationally recognized artist. She participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions all over the world. His work is held in the following permanent collections: New York Museum of Modern Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, Australia, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Istanbul Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou.
