The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by German artist, Katharina Grosse to be held at its Schloss Derneburg location.

 

Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1961 and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Considered to be one of the most important painters working today, she is known for using industrial spray paint to create intensely colored and multi-layered paintings on canvas as well as on a variety of surfaces, including expansive and immersive site-specific installations.  Examples of both her studio practice and site-specific work will be presented in this exhibition, which includes a suite of recently completed large-scale paintings on canvas and works on paper, in addition to a monumental fabric piece, o.T. (2013). Installed in the castle’s main entrance, o.T. refers to Grosse’s first spray painting executed in 1998 for the project space of Kunsthalle Bern.

 

Working across a variety of media, Grosse extends the limits of what can be depicted on canvas. One senses in her work a continual willingness to experiment, to reconfigure the relationship of color and form, creating rhythmic structures of pure coloration and texture. Indeed, it is Grosse’s use of color that immediately leaps to viewers’ eyes, especially in the way she utilizes color to communicate an emotional tone that intentionally diverges from the formality oftentimes imposed by works on canvas.

 

For Grosse, what is essential is that the overall impression of a work be constructed from many layers. Akin to developmental stages, this layering process becomes a kind of commentary on a work’s overarching design. One can understand each gestural aspect of Grosse’s paintings, every application of color and texture, as a kind of signature element that contributes to the integrity of the whole.

 

Grosse’s sprawling, multidirectional works overflow with the pigments used to render them. Sometimes a painting dissolves into fields of color, while a few paintings are infused with a glowing, pastel-like fleshiness that lends their contours a playful quality. Grosse’s heavily layered works seem to be at odds with themselves, and it is through this juxtaposition that one can understand the authentic meaning of the artist’s creative conscience: the active destabilization of perspective. This has little to do with effacing the tradition of painting, but rather concerns the realization of surrounding structures that transform particular sites over particular durations of time.

 

In the past twenty years Katharina Grosse has been honoured with several solo exhibitions. Recent institutional presentations and site specific works include Rockaway! for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway programme in Fort Tilden, New York (2016); Asphalt Air and Hair at ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017); This Drove My Mother up the Wall at South London Gallery (2017); The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped at Carriageworks, Sydney (2018); Wunderbild at National Gallery in Prague (2018/2019); Mumbling Mud at chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018/2019) as well as at chi K11 art space in Guangzhou (2019); Mural: Jackson Pollock I Katharina Grosse at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019/2020). Currently, It Wasn’t Us is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, and Is It You? is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has held professorships at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–2009) and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–2018).

 

Katharina Grosse is represented by KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin/London/Tokyo, Gagosian Gallery and Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder.

 

Katharina Grosseis part of Berlin kommt nach Niedersachsen, a series of four exhibitions centered around the works of artists living and working in Berlin. Katharina Grosse is presented concurrently with solo exhibitions of work by Karl Horst Hödicke, Johannes Kahrs and Szene Berlin, a group show including approximately 30 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and videos by over two dozen Berlin-based artists, created from the early 1990s to works completed this year.