ART-PRESENTATION: Katharina Grosse|Tatiana Trouvé
Recent works by Katharina Grosse and Tatiana Trouvé are presented in the joint exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in Basel. This is the second time that Grosse and Trouvé have exhibited together, after the exhibition “Le numerose irregolarità” at Villa Medici, Rome, in 2018, although in Basel their works are displayed side by side in unprecedented direct relation.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
At first, Grosse’s flamboyant prints and Trouvé’s meditative sculptures appear contrapuntally opposed: silk against bronze and glass; dripping, aleatory colors against spare lines and volumes. Despite their contrasting approaches to materiality and hue, each artist’s work animates, illuminates, and adapts to the other’s. Both the prints and sculptures reproduce elements of the artist’s studio and the real world while signaling to their illusionistic modes of facture, creating dialogue between the works that dramatizes a continuous give-and-take between absorption and reflection. 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. To create her vibrant abstract works, Katharina Grosse blasts paint across canvas with a spray gun. Her energetic, arcing motions cover the studio walls in pigment, conceptually echoing her practice of painting in situ directly on the surfaces of objects, rooms, or entire buildings. In three enormous silk hangings, the material accumulations of Grosse’s painting process (buckets, chairs, cables, and canvases, strewn against a color-flooded wall) are captured in digital print. Grosse’s uncannily self-reflexive prints destabilize perceptions of volume and weight; cluttered, photorealistic walls appear architecturally solid but melt into diaphanous swaths of fabric, susceptible to the slightest movement of air. In disquieting, entropic mise-en-scènes, Tatiana Trouvé limns the boundaries between the mental and the physical, where material space and form converge with immaterial time and memory. Her situations combine intricate scenographic drawings, sculptures both linear and three-dimensional, and spaces that hint at invisible dimensions. Whether found or created, Trouvé’s “environmental dramas” are melancholy yet highly charged, palimpsests containing echoes of other lived spaces and realities, which oscillate between the real, the imaginary, and the phantasmic. In Tatiana Trouvé’s series “Les indéfinis “ (2014– ), plexiglass replicas of art-shipping crates are paired with hyperrealistic bronze or copper casts of common objects. In a subversion of material solidity, pliant household items (tires, electrical cords, and macramé hangings) are re-created in unyielding metal, while the greenish luster of plexiglass transforms the crate from a coarse container for art transportation into a work of art itself. Against these limpid vitrines, Trouvé’s casts become three-dimensional drawings, as if the wires, gears, and foils of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” (1915–23) have escaped their panes, reemerging as diagrammatic objects.
Photo: Left: Katharina Grosse, Untitled(detail), 2019 Digital print on silk, 270 × 600 × 20 cm, © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2019. Right: Tatiana Trouvé, Les indéfinis (Detail, 2017–18, Plexiglass, bronze, patina, steel, and paint, 176.7 × 136.1 × 120 cm, © Tatiana Trouvé
Info: Gagosian Gallery, Rheinsprung 1, Basel, Duration: 13/6-16/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat qo:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com
