Katharina Grosse
12 Dec 2009 - 07 Nov 2010
UTOPIA - KATHARINA GROSSE
Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What’s Your Name
12 December 2009 – 7 November 2010
Katharina Grosse pulls the painting out of the frame and lets us step into it
Colorful clouds of paint, a 200 cubic meter mound of earth and arced paintings 12 meters high fill the Art Axis, making up an all-encompassing three-dimensional painting.
Paint strokes flow across the floor and the walls, merging the architectural surfaces. The whole room changes shape, creating a new, potential space – a utopian “no-place” inspiring us to think beyond our existing circumstances to a new and better world.
Fact and Imagination
Grosse’s installations draw upon a number of heterogeneous references, including renaissance frescoes and murals, abstract painting, psychedelic imagery and graffiti. On several levels, they orchestrate an aesthetic dissolution of boundaries: between architecture and image, painting and its surroundings, the material and the imaginary, fact and imagination. Grosses works aim at opening up gaps in our habitual experience and perceptions. As the artist states:
“The fusion of incompatible systems leads to a confrontation with quite different mental processes than those one is trained for in everyday life, where there is only one answer to a question.”
The painting is a landscape
Entering the room, we step into the painting. The artwork unfolds as a landscape before our eyes. We can move around in it, observe it from new angles and experience the monumental painting changing around us.
We grow and shrink
Grosse’s works has many different parts, creating variation in the painterly surfaces and in how we perceive ourselves in relation to the artwork. At either end of the Art Axis, Grosse is showing drawings and paintings on paper. These framed works seem small and contained next to the giant painting unfurling along the Art Axis and, especially, next to the 12 meter high elliptical paintings leaning against the wall by the Red Axis. This variation in size makes us, by turns, small and big in relation to the overall work.
Greeting the unknown
The installation is titled Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name?, referring to the positive, poetic universe that the work constitutes. The title expresses the game of transformation that is a part of the work and a basic element of utopia: the desire for something different, something better.
Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What’s Your Name
12 December 2009 – 7 November 2010
Katharina Grosse pulls the painting out of the frame and lets us step into it
Colorful clouds of paint, a 200 cubic meter mound of earth and arced paintings 12 meters high fill the Art Axis, making up an all-encompassing three-dimensional painting.
Paint strokes flow across the floor and the walls, merging the architectural surfaces. The whole room changes shape, creating a new, potential space – a utopian “no-place” inspiring us to think beyond our existing circumstances to a new and better world.
Fact and Imagination
Grosse’s installations draw upon a number of heterogeneous references, including renaissance frescoes and murals, abstract painting, psychedelic imagery and graffiti. On several levels, they orchestrate an aesthetic dissolution of boundaries: between architecture and image, painting and its surroundings, the material and the imaginary, fact and imagination. Grosses works aim at opening up gaps in our habitual experience and perceptions. As the artist states:
“The fusion of incompatible systems leads to a confrontation with quite different mental processes than those one is trained for in everyday life, where there is only one answer to a question.”
The painting is a landscape
Entering the room, we step into the painting. The artwork unfolds as a landscape before our eyes. We can move around in it, observe it from new angles and experience the monumental painting changing around us.
We grow and shrink
Grosse’s works has many different parts, creating variation in the painterly surfaces and in how we perceive ourselves in relation to the artwork. At either end of the Art Axis, Grosse is showing drawings and paintings on paper. These framed works seem small and contained next to the giant painting unfurling along the Art Axis and, especially, next to the 12 meter high elliptical paintings leaning against the wall by the Red Axis. This variation in size makes us, by turns, small and big in relation to the overall work.
Greeting the unknown
The installation is titled Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name?, referring to the positive, poetic universe that the work constitutes. The title expresses the game of transformation that is a part of the work and a basic element of utopia: the desire for something different, something better.