Katharina Grosse (b. 1961)

Often working in murals and installations of monumental scale, Katharina Grosse’s abstract practice weaves colours together in tapestries of billowing textural depths. In this Untitled (2004), Grosse presents a vision in a vibrant orange and luminescent pale blue, illuminated by a resonant sunset light. Grosse’s elegant variations of brushstrokes give her overlapping bands of colour a translucent glow and a creased, textural fabric, as if placing veils over one another; the interplay of tones marked by Gosse’s shifting treatments of light and shade conjures a delicate sense of gauzy material. Gosse’s experiments of colour and illusionistic depth are interventions into the visual plane, experimenting with the way in which paint disrupts our everyday optical experience. ‘I think color is such an interesting analytical aspect of painting. It can sit anywhere. It can fit into anything. It can unify or break up the hierarchical orderliness of how we see the world. The coincidence of the painted image and the existing image field is very interesting. It is not synchronicity that makes them appear the way they do. They are basic forms. Otherwise you wouldn’t see them. You wouldn’t see them as painted images.’ (K. Grosse, ‘Katharina Grosse with Phong Bui’ in Brooklyn Rail, March 1, 2017, https://brooklynrail.org/2017/03/art/Katharina-Grosse-with-Phong-Bui [accessed March 10, 2017]).