PREVIEW: Katharina Grosse-Studio Paintings 1988-2022

In her studio practice and celebrated in situ works, Katharina Grosse explores and expands the physical properties, material presence, optical effects and aesthetic potentials of color and paint. Every canvas is both rigorously experimental and an organic fragment of something more expansive. This can be traced to her earliest works created at a time when the art world was dominated by male abstract painters. For Grosse, painting is a model of how to be and act in the world.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kemper Art Museum Archive

“Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988-2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions” is first major survey to focus on Katharina Grosse’s studio-based paintings, the exhibition will investigate the important role large-scale canvases have played throughout her career, from the late 1980s to the present day. In the exhibition, 37 large-scale canvases are organized into two thematic sections, each inspired by key elements of Grosse’s painterly method, as conceptualized by Eckmann. The opening section, “Returns/Revisions/Inventions” highlights the artist’s intuitive, process-based artistic practice. Colors, textures, and shapes appear in flux as they emerge, then return on different canvases, only to transform yet again as new images. One early work from 1991, for example, features a wide band of pale pink-onto-orange that slashes across equivalently scaled layers of red, blue and yellow. In 2004, Grosse employed a similar composition, yet with movements more fluid, colors more modulated, and the interplay between painting and underpainting more complex. Meanwhile, at a time when international gestural painting was largely dominated by male painters, Grosse’s use of spraying techniques, beginning in the late 1990s, contested the importance of direct connections to the artist’s hand — and thus the long-cherished link between painting and artistic subjectivity. At the same time, her approach to layering rather than mixing paint opened new chromatic possibilities and destabilized conventional hierarchies of figure and ground, above and below. The second section, “Fissures/Ruptures” emphasizes the various means through which Grosse interrogates the alleged autonomy of painting, stretching its boundaries and physical properties to connect with external spaces and social contexts. Since the early 2010s, Grosse has combined sprayers and stencils to produce spatial voids or gaps that paradoxically become active players on the visual field, testing the interplay between chance and control. Other works from the mid-2010s have expanded this process to create collagelike images of almost geological density. Compressed, fractured and destabilized, these paintings-within-paintings defy all sense of chronological order. More recently, Grosse has displaced the stencil with slashed canvases, thereby assimilating the actual wall of the museum into the work. At the same time, she has upended analogies between art and nature by adhering tree branches to the canvas and spray-painting over them. In some cases, the branches remain part of the final work; in others, Grosse removes the branches, leaving behind a visualization of their absence. The exhibition also presents three new fabric pieces, which, echoing the performative nature of Grosse’s studio practice, feature digitally manipulated photographs that offer enlarged reproductions of unfinished paintings as well as of Grosse’s workspace and painting process. Printed on thin sheets of silk, these pieces are hung in vertical layers from the 25-foot ceilings of the Kemper Art Museum’s Saligman Family Atrium, creating narrow pathways through which viewers can walk and experience both the assertive presence and environmental scale of Grosse’s work.

Photo: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2004. Oil on canvas. 70 7/8 x 98 5/8 in. (180 x 250.5 cm). © Katharina Grosse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Olaf Bergmann

Info: Curators: Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, 1 Brookings Dr, St. Louis, Mo, USA, Duration: 23/9/2022-23/1/2023, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/