© Images Roman März

KATHARINA GROSSE
PSYCHOPAPIER

KÖNIG BERLIN
9 NOVEMBER – 14 DECEMBER 2013

It is with great pleasure that KÖNIG GALERIE presents Katharina Grosse’s 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.

FEATURED ARTIST

KATHARINA GROSSE
Katharina Grosse (b. 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New Zealand. Grosse held professorships at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Germany from 2000-2009 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany from 2010-2018. For more than twenty-five years, the artist Katharina Grosse has been internationally present in the art world. Her painting maintains a position outside the categories of representation and abstraction: it operates in reality and on reality. For her, painting can precipitate everywhere and anywhere – on any surface and any object that sprayed paint can reach.

Her recent institu...
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