Katharina Grosse is known for her site-specific paintings that she unfolds into unique formations on walls, floors, furniture, buildings, tree trunks, and the ground, among other things. As color merges with its support, expansive multimedia pictures evolve.
But what happens when these settings are changed and individual elements are removed from their original overall installations? How can we perceive this transformation process, which is about autonomy and recontextualizing the picture?
These are the questions Katharina Grosse will address in her seventh solo exhibition at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder. The presented pictures are directly linked to Grosse’s exhibition at the Albertina titled Warum Drei Töne Kein Dreieck Bilden (Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle). This Viennese institution, which boasts one of the most important collections of drawings and works on paper in the world, has enabled Grosse to work with a picture that fills an entire space as a form of exhibition. In its historical rooms, transparent foils, often forming folds, are stretched across all the exhibition walls, becoming a picture support that Grosse integrates into the pictorial space together with the canvases that are mounted on top of these and with parts of the floor. In an expansive and powerful gesture, she has spray-painted over the materials and the architecture, merging these into a joint support for her installation. “In her most recent works, streams and strands of color flow in opposite directions in centrifugal and concentric movements, atomizing into nothingness, only to find themselves again in harmonious unison or in the interplay of the creation and dissolution of form,” says Angela Stief, the curator of the exhibition at the Albertina in the accompanying catalogue.
Katharina Grosse does not regard her painting as homogenous, for her pictorial space is always perforated by physical space. “I want to achieve a change of view – away from the limited field of the canvas towards what lies outside its borders. That which does not belong to the painting can become part of the work. I am interested in this kind of pictorial disturbance that happens e.g. in the folds of the foil or the fabric, in the doorway between the exhibition spaces, or in the empty spaces that appear, where a canvas has been re-hung. These elements create a constant sense of movement, the image is simultaneously in its permanent dissolution and its restoration.”
The pictures in the gallery’s exhibition are from this very ensemble at the Albertina, meaning a contextual and formal transfer of these site-specific works takes place. The canvases that are stretched and extracted from the environment they were originally intended for gain a new autonomy and perspective. That thinking in terms of space and the picture are of equal importance to Grosse can clearly be seen in the pictures in this exhibition: They are the result of the artist’s unique multimedia experiments through which she continues to conquer new terrains of painting.
The exhibition title Unclarify What Belongs was taken from an essay of the same name by Monika Rinck in the catalogue for the exhibition at the Albertina.
