Katharina Grosse paints spaces, often quite literally, as she applies colors to walls, floors, complete houses, and the arrangements of materials she installs in exhibitions. In a series of 15 large-scale studio paintings from 2022/2023, shown at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and presented in this book, her colorful swirls and bundles of twirling paint lines are like excerpts from a larger movement, amplified beyond the artist’s bodily reach by her weapon of choice, the spray gun. “My work has a lot to do with the first initiative of physical impact,” the artist says. “It is the full impact out of the center of the body almost ending in an attack, which I then transform into a colorful event.” The forms repeat and vary and sometimes are interrupted by shadows of branches—in their aesthetic assault the viewer detects many subtleties. The large-format illustrations of the paintings alternate with details and installation shots, replicating both the immediate experience and the conceptual reconfiguration of the painterly gesture in Grosse’s work.

COLOUR AS SUCH
(excerpt from the essay by Jurriaan Benschop)

For a start, it is worth noting that the works in the exhibition are all part of the same family. In fact, several of the paintings were made simultaneously, the result of the same painting session. In the studio, the canvases, still unstretched, were pinned on a large wall, with space between them. The artist passed by with her spray gun, colour by colour, and responded to each canvas slightly differently. The serial aspect is essential here; the works appear to be variations on a motif. The result does not seem like an ongoing flow of paint that pulls the whole space together, yet through the likenesses between the works, there is the suggestion of a larger whole of which fragments emerge in the individual paintings.

The motif is the curving line – or, rather, a bundle of them, streaming, in six different colours sprayed unmixed onto the canvases. The way the colours mingle or overlap differs per painting, as does the effect this creates for the viewer. The motifs produce flashes of recognition, correspondences with things we recognise. One resembles a flame, another a jumble of cables, and yet another makes you think of the wind blowing through vegetation, or propelling dust. There is also the occasional reference to the human body. Some works end up being fiery and warm, while others remain rather cool. It is as if the artist has researched how slight shifts in spraying the paint lead to different associations and temperatures, even if you use the same colours and operate within the same formal vocabulary.

The whitish background creates a quiet space onto which the curving colours can articulate themselves explicitly as ‘the action’. The background seems important. It functions like silent surroundings in which the painter’s voice resonates. It could also be read as ‘the big everything’ (endless space) or, for that matter, ‘the big nothing’, in which the painter acts and makes her marks. The void might also be metaphorical, in the sense that the painter holds on to nothing, when setting out to make a painting.

Cables of colours loop in parallel movement, crossing, or entangling. A node of strings flares upwards like fire alighting, and then the lines exit the frame sideways. There are no corners or sharp edges, everything comes in curves, and bending movements. Some of the paintings offer a long-distance view, which makes the bundles appear gentle, curving like a river as seen from above. Others seem close by, zoomed in, which creates a feeling of density and heightened intensity, suggesting that the different ropes are in conflict, or in competition. As a whole, the paintings seem active, moving, floating, and cutting through the undefined pictorial space…

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Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa, distributed by Holzwarth Publications