PRESENTATION: Katharina Grosse-Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips

Widely known for her in situ paintings, in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, Katharina Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a spray gun, distancing the artistic act from the hand, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Katharina Grosse presents new paintings in her solo exhibition “Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips”. Grosse uses a compressor-driven spray gun to apply industrial paints directly onto landscapes, architecture, objects, and panels. This tool extends her reach and accelerates her gestures, balancing impulsiveness with intent. In her studio outside Berlin, she produces works on canvas in a practice that is consistent with the spontaneous flow of her improvisational, performative process. Painting in the studio also permits her to develop works over a longer period than the institutional and organizational constraints of her in-situ projects generally allow. In her studio paintings as much as in her environmental works, Grosse uses paint to claim territory at immersive scales, introducing new conceptions of color and space that disorient and reorient the viewer. To make them, she sprays paint onto unstretched canvases in a varied palette of vibrant primary and secondary hues, making use of chromatic and spatial juxtaposition. The propulsive, rhythmic marks traverse the paintings as tapering lines and whiplash curves that spiral back on themselves, capturing the trajectories of the artist’s full-body movements. The exhibition’s title, “Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips”, breaks down the elements of language and reassembles them into idiosyncratic structures, like a revolving thought, repeated but anagrammatically, illogically reversed. Likewise, conventional relationships between figure and ground in these paintings are superseded by layered forms that appear to move with tumultuous fluidity over and under one another. Grosse intertwines and twists strands of color, creating spatial complexities that confuse a sequential reading. Confronting the viewer with immediately impactful compositions, the paintings also invite sustained attention to comprehend their pictorial entanglements. Grosse’s expansive gestures extend over the paintings’ edges, alluding to spaces beyond the canvas; one senses that there is more than can be seen. This approach resonates with the speed, directness, and boundlessness that is central to Grosse’s practice, engaged as it is with the possibilities of abstraction in art, but also by diverse relationships with the external world, from prelingual thoughts to the visceral impact of music. Grosse’s work can be contextualised in relation to an earlier generation of German post-war artists, including Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Blinky Palermo. These artists were at the forefront of a new focus on conceptual painting that rose to prominence in the 1960s. While Grosse’s work engages with some of the same conceptual concerns as this group, it steps further into the realm of the expanded field of painting – that is painting that extends beyond conventions of two-dimensional supports, traditional media, and containment to a picture plane. An example of this is her 2016 work “Rockaway”, which transformed an abandoned New York seaside building into an artwork. Grosse spraypainted the building and its surrounds to create an immersive artwork. Whilst operating on an entirely different scale, Grosse’s approach to the two-dimensional surface of a canvas reflects her expanded field thinking. Such works are notable for lavish colors, complex layering, and non-conventional methods of paint application. Color is essential to Grosse, and she achieves intense, visceral arrangements through careful blending and application of primary and secondary colors. Each hue has the function of distinguishing between different movements and her extremely physical process of application is reflected within the pictorial space.

Photo: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 112 3/4 x 191 1/2 inches (286.4 x 486.4 cm), © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024, Photo: Owen Conway, Courtesy Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/11-21/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/