Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Katharina Grosse Challenges Perceptions of Painting and Space in New Works

"Painting doesn't follow the rules of architectural space; it has a totally different set of rules. Why should it then behave exactly according to those rules?" This is the question that German artist Katharina Grosse asks herself as she creates her colorful explosions over earth, objects and canvas. Her works, previously covered here, are raw and produced quickly with little else besides the artist's spray gun.  The way that Grosse arranges colors has been recently studied in Gagosian Gallery of London's massive survey of Spray Art. Whether she is creating an outdoor installation or painting on canvas, all of her pieces are site specific, as in her latest exhibition, "The Smoking Kid," which closed over the weekend at König Gallerie in Berlin.

“Painting doesn’t follow the rules of architectural space; it has a totally different set of rules. Why should it then behave exactly according to those rules?” This is the question that German artist Katharina Grosse asks herself as she creates her colorful explosions over earth, objects and canvas. Her works, previously covered here, are raw and produced quickly with little else besides the artist’s spray gun.  The way that Grosse arranges colors has been recently studied in Gagosian Gallery of London’s massive survey of Spray Art. Whether she is creating an outdoor installation or painting on canvas, all of her pieces are site specific, as in her latest exhibition, “The Smoking Kid,” which closed over the weekend at König Gallerie in Berlin. Her exhibit presented a series of new paintings pointing outwards towards the entrance of the space. They portray the same sort of cracks or fractures that one could find in Grosse’s larger installations, which reconsider our sense of physical space and movement in a new context. To her, paintings are another way of looking at 2D space, where the image and thought come together to form something deeper than a measurable, 3D space. How a painting appears in its environment is important to the viewer’s experience. This is also how Grosse approached her largest installation to date, now on view at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The result is a “living picture” that visitors can move through, composed of soil and trees painted with bright permutations of color. Take a look at more of Katharina Grosse’s latest works below.

Meta
Related Articles
To step inside a creation by The Very Many is to briefly cross over into an alien world. The New York City-based studio, led by French artist-architect Marc Fornes, makes installations and environments that can feel both functional and purely aesthetic. The studio says its specialization is “computational design and digital fabrication,” though the results can feel organic in nature. Fornes was last featured on cctvta.com here.
French based artist duo Ella & Pitr, first featured on our Tumblr, create largescale aerial murals of children's book-inspired characters. Unless you have a birds eye view, it's difficult to appreciate the scope of the majority of their works, which can be found on rooftops, airplane runways, and even huge grassy fields. Their latest mural is not only their largest, it is also the largest outdoor mural in the world to date at 226,040 square feet.
In recent years, Mexico City has played host to some of the most progressive urban artists in the world. Many of them have come together in Celeya Brothers' anniversary exhibition, "Cuatro Igual A Uno": 3TTMan, Christiaan Conradie, Franco Fasoli aka JAZ, Fusca, Augustine Kofie, Lesuperdemon, Sten & Lex, Sanez, Smithe and Jorge Tellaeche. The group represents not only the freshman artists to show with the gallery, but also the city's international draw, hailing from the United States, South Africa, to Argentina. Take a look at more photos from the exhibition after the jump.
James Moore’s futuristic installations blend elements of sci-fi, light experimentation, and post-apocalyptic visions. He uses massive cybernetic characters and gridwork to toy with perspectives in the room his work inhabits. And in recent work, blends 3D sculpture with those illusionary tactics.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List