Foreword

Since the 1960s, the international neo-avant-garde has captured new spaces by increasingly integrating societal and social contexts into the field of artistic practice. This development continues to shape the ideas and methods of contemporary art to this day. Painting is similarly influenced by this striving for a larger context-a process that Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg) has been pursuing for the last twenty-five years.

Grosse became internationally renowned in the late 1990s for her sensational installations, employing a spraying technique to realize these paintings in situ. Her first work sprayed directly onto an existing architectural structure was created in 1998 at the Kunsthalle Bern. Soon after, Grosse expanded her works to even larger surfaces, transforming not only the walls and floors of museums and exhibition halls, but also entire landscapes and urban spaces, as well as organic materials and objects into colored environments that viewers could enter and walk through. The results were always radically painterly, combining the luminosity of pure pigments with the large-scale character of Land Art, blurring the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality. Today, Katharina Grosse is one of the most significant contemporary artists. Her work exemplifies the erosion of traditional boundaries of painting and challenges viewers, in Grosse's own unique way, to question their usual habits of seeing and thinking vis-à-vis painting.

The Publication

The present volume of conversations, which accompanies the exhibition at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, brings together eleven in-depth interviews that Klaus Dermutz conducted with Katharina Grosse in her studio in Berlin Moabit between 2020 and 2022. The individual interviews probe the central themes of her artistic work in great depth, more so than in any other previous publication - exploring concerns such as the haptic image, the border, reversal, repetition without origin, interruption, the visible and the invisible, and temporality, to name just a few.

The conversations also discuss the range of methods (milling, heaping, casting, printing, spraying, etc.) and materials (earth, wood, aluminum, latex, glass, metal mesh) employed in her work over the past forty years. The question of how these methods continue to shape Katharina Grosse's insights into the possibilities of the painted image is explored. The conversations are illuminated by a rich trove of images from the artist's own private archive, offering unparalleled insight into the multifaceted panorama of her radical way of thinking and working.

Wunderbild

The desire to grant Katharina Grosse the space of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg for her energetic, immersive art has existed for a long time. We are all the more delighted that the installation Wunderbild, an absolute masterpiece and milestone in her art, unites the vastness of the Deichtorhallen's Hall for Contemporary Art with the expansive power of her painting, while at the same time serving as starting point for an extensive exhibition devoted to her art. The walk-in work, which has never been shown anywhere else except in Prague, challenges the classic forms of pictorial representation in a highly unique manner. Originally developed in 2018 for the Messepalast of the National Gallery in Prague, Katharina Grosse restaged this monumental installation in Hamburg and supplemented it with a sound piece composed especially for the work by Stephan Schneider. The installation consists of two gigantic, approximately 55-metre-wide paintings on overlapping pieces of fabric suspended from the ceiling and flowing several meters across the floor, which can be viewed from both sides. The central space of the Hall for Contemporary Art remains otherwise untouched, giving the Wunderbild undivided attention. The painting extends over two surfaces across more than two-thirds of the length of the hall and looks as if nature itself had been transformed into a painting. In this canyon of color, visitors pass through a corridor between fabric panels, transforming the exhibition environment into a living space of reflection as visitors move through the work.

As emphasized in the catalog for the Prague installation of the Wunderbild, the work represents a watershed in the artist's career. It is the first and only time that Katharina Grosse has worked with stencils on such a large surface. The resulting empty sections within the complex layered painting act like windows onto imaginary spaces and lend the work a distinctly architectural character. The shifts between sprayed and unsprayed passages that both project and recede open the work to a variety of interpretations and associations. In the unpainted areas, for example, one could speak of unoccupied intermediate spaces-of picture windows or frames within the picture, reminiscent of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, inviting viewers to take alternating movements through different pictures within the larger image. These voids can also be perceived as mysterious sound holes in the larger structure of iridescent dark and light green, red, or pale blue sprays of color; hermetic blank fields that fall out of rhythm in the broad continuum of the densely packed painting in terms of perspective and space. In addition to stencils, Katharina Grosse has also repeatedly worked with cut-up canvases, as a means of interrupting the fluidity and illusionism of the sprayed traces of color with hard-edge painting forms.

Earth Piece

In a 300-square-meter room at the back of the hall, Grosse has created an earth piece that forms a vibrant contrast to the large, hanging fabric panels. The painting covers almost the entire area of the floor and parts of the walls, continuing seamlessly onto these organic mounds of earth. Here too, a narrow path leads through the landscape, allowing visitors to actively experience the work through perambulation. The smell and tactile quality of the earth similarly influences the act of perception, while the colors change depending on the movement of the viewer and the raking light. The aura of the artwork dissipates as visitors, with their feet, leave their own real imprints that the artist herself could not have foreseen or controlled.

Prodigious Canvases

In the exhibition, there are six large-format canvases that illustrate a striking change in Grosse's work between 2005 and 2024. The earlier works, mostly painted with wide brushes, appear more reduced and in some ways bulkier, with sweeping gestures of color that emphasize the flatness of the painted structures and reveal the color itself as a kind of setting. The artist's characteristic gestures extend beyond the edges of the canvases and strive to remove the boundaries inherent in pictorial space-a concept that plays a central role in Grosse's artistic practice and leaves an immediate and lasting impression on the viewer's senses. The more recent works executed in spray technique, on the other hand, are more playful and serial, with wild bundles of color that emerge from the depth of the picture in rollercoaster-like loops. Sharp and blurred areas are separated from each other as in a photograph. In these works, the means of expression-the spray nozzle and the artist's gesture-merge and intensify the emotional impact of the works.

Film

In contrast to her large indoor and outdoor installations, in which Katharina Grosse works with larger teams, and which are often preceded by various planning phases, the artist is completely self-reliant for the works that are created in her studio. Claudia Müller's film documents the process of creating the works and provides fascinating insight into the mental and physical dimension of Katharina Grosse's painting. The viewer is thus directly invited into the process of consideration regarding the choice of colors and the gestural moments that shape the physical-performative events during the painting process. Together with award-winning cinematographer Christine A. Maier, the director documented the process of creating the works over several days on the studio premises in Trechwitz/Brandenburg from various perspectives and, together with Isabel Maier, who was responsible for the editing, realized the thirty-minute film. The aim of the film is to involve visitors directly in this process in order to further hone our understanding of the artist's work.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go first and foremost to Katharina Grosse for the opportunity to present her extraordinary art in the Deichtorhallen and for the inspiring collaboration throughout. Special thanks also go to her studio team, including Hans Grosse, Maximiliane Kolle, Jona Lueddeckens, Ivonne Schwarz, and Philippa von Wittgenstein. Additional thanks to Klaus Dermutz for the extremely stimulating interviews with the artist published here. Without this dialogue, much valuable knowledge might otherwise remain obscured. I would also like to thank Colin Lang, the co-editor and translator of the book, Kristin Rieber, the managing editor, as well as the copy-editors and Hatje Cantz Verlag for their great work. I would also like to thank Claudia Müller and her team and the producer Rebekka Garrido from Manderley Films for the excellent film about Katharina Grosse, which premiered as part of the exhibition. I would also like to thank all those who supported the project financially. Gagosian, Galerie Max Hetzler, Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, National-Bank Essen, Peter Frankenheim Stiftung, and the Wunderblock Stiftung are to be thanked for their generous support of the film. I would also like to thank the Förderkreis of the...