ART CITIES:London-Katharina Grosse
Katharina Grosse is known for the vibrant palette and exuberant gestures of her large-scale canvases and raucous installations that merge painting, sculpture, and architecture. The artist has pushed the limits of her spray-painted, site-specific installations into realms few painters dare to go. Her pioneering of large-scale productions, has included everything from an historic railway station house in Sweden to a giant pile of multi-hued soil.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: South London Gallery Archive
For her first institutional solo exhibition in London, Katharina Grosse presents a new work, “This Drove my Mother up the Wall”, painted in situ at the South London Gallery. Grosse’s large scale and site-specific works engulf both interior and exterior spaces, unhindered by the traditional boundaries of the pictorial field. In the South London Gallery’s main exhibition space, Grosse has made the void the dramatic centre of her project, masking the floor with a large foam stencil, then painting over it and the surrounding walls. Once she removes the stencil, a bright, white area of floor is revealed, untouched by the veils of colour and broad, propulsive marks spreading to all sides. This filtering technique is also evident in Grosse’s recent canvas works, where stencils are placed over areas of the canvas at various stages of the painting process, resulting in chromatic layers that record her thoughts and actions. Also the artist has selected two documentary films to be screened in the first floor galleries, intended to frame her creative practice and research interests. In the short documentary from the series “Women Artists” (2016) by Claudia Müller, Grosse curates a fantasy exhibition by eight other female artists and discusses her selection of artists and artworks, the relationship between their practices, and guides the viewer through a virtual realisation of her ideal group exhibition. The second documentary film is “The Gleaners and I” (2000), by Agnès Varda, a source of inspiration for Grosse’s South London Gallery installation. Since 1554, when King Henry IV affirmed the right of gleaning, it has been a practice protected by the French constitution, and today the men and women who sift through the dumpsters and markets of Paris are the descendants of gleaners who were painted by Millet and Van Gogh. leaners traditionally follow the harvest, scavenging what was missed the first time around. In Agnes Varda’s meditative new film we see them in potato fields and apple orchards, where the farmers actually welcome them (tons of apples are missed by the first pickers because the professionals work fast and are not patient in seeking the hidden fruit). Then we meet urban gleaners, including an artist who finds objects he can make into sculpture, and a man who has not paid for his food for more than 10 years. The true gleaner, in Varda’s eyes, is a little noble, a little idealistic, a little stubborn and deeply thrifty.
Info: South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Road, London, Duration: 28/9-3/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, www.southlondongallery.org
