König

Katharina Grosse

09 Nov - 14 Dec 2013

© Katharina Grosse
KATHARINA GROSSE
Psychopapier
9 November – 14 December 2013

It is with great pleasure that Johann König, Berlin presents Katharina Grosse’s second solo exhibition, so turning the focus to a hitherto relatively unknown but important medium in the artist’s oeuvre. Whilst Grosse’s painting finds expression above all on walls, on the facades of buildings, in living spaces, on earth, materials, balloons, polystyrene objects and canvases, she here chooses paper as the playing field for her painting.

What makes paper special for Grosse as a painter is not just the immediacy, the treatability, the manageability of the medium: the expansive, extended movements that she makes when painting in an enclosed space or on large-format objects are compressed and accelerated in the paper format. This compression, however, does not prevent the image from simultaneously reaching out far beyond the picture surface.

What Grosse achieves in her canvas works by using earth or dis-placement, she realizes here by physically going to work on the paper itself. The paper is folded, rolled up, covered over. The push-pins with which templates are affixed to the painting plane perforate the surfaces of the paper. The medium allows Grosse to use paintbrush, templates and airbrush, but also to apply paint with her fingers. This too is new – artistic expression with and without physical touch.

What fascinates Grosse about painting is this spatio-temporal rendition of the non-simultaneous (in the process of production) into a visual simultaneity (in the process of reception) – the de-rigidification of relationships in the thinking process. The beholder here encounters a form of pictorial imaging and a form of thinking whose openness and variability evade any traditional canon of systems and whose genesis does not require any abstraction of the objective world.

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). She lives and works in Berlin. Before accepting a chair at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2010 she was Professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Apart from a multitude of international group exhibitions and biennales her works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, the Palais des Tokyo in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Currently the Public Art Fund is presenting her first outdoor work in New York, in front of the Metrotech Center, Brooklyn. Her works are represented in public and private collections such as those of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kunsthaus Zurich or the Kunstsammlung NRW, Dusseldorf.
 

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