Julian McKinnon on Katharina Grosse

A painting is simply a screen between the producer and the spectator where both can look at the thought processes residing on the screen from different angles and points in time. It enables me to look at the residue of my thinking. [1]

Katharina Grosse

As a discipline, abstract painting can seem rarefied and intellectual. This is in keeping with its historical standing as a highly academicised artform, though abstraction also has immense expressive potential. German artist Katharina Grosse has built a stellar international reputation for her inventive approach to abstract painting, which holds academic weight while also disrupting conventions and presenting viewers with new ways of seeing.

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.

Engagement with the expanded field is most evident in Grosse’s monumental and vibrantly colourful ‘in situ’ works. Bucking conventions of support, medium specificity, and scale, these works bring landscape and architecture into the scope of painting.[2] While operating on an entirely different scale, Grosse’s approach to the two-dimensional surface of a canvas reflects her expanded field thinking. Untitled No. 1026 is a work of complex layering and striking colour. It is noticeable for its lavish colours, runs of paint, and non-conventional methods of paint application.

In her 2010 essay Painting Spaces, Danish contemporary art professor Anne Ring Peterson states, “Grosse often spray-paints her works spontaneously and without preliminary sketches. She uses a standard tool of house painters and graffiti artists, the ‘mechanised brush’ of the spray gun.”[3] Just such a tool appears to have been used to create Untitled No. 1026. This enables the artist to work on a dramatic scale, while also transforming the visual register of the artwork. Ring Peterson adds, “By using a spray gun Grosse does not only establish a cool distance to Abstract Expressionism and the modernist myth of painting as an authentic ‘imprint’ of the artist’s hand and a direct expression of his inner life. She also enlarges the gestures of the hand, making them bigger and more powerful than the physique of the human body allows.”[4]

In addition to its monumental scale, Untitled No. 1026 plays into the non-linear register of painting. Written language necessarily reads from top to bottom, left to right (in European languages at least). This linear structure can’t be compromised, or the meaning of the text collapses. Paintings are read differently; one takes in the whole, then focuses on details. Visual pathways are subjective, nuanced, idiosyncratic. Grosse has discussed this general effect in a video interview, stating, “The linguistic structure urges you toward a certain order system where things follow one another, which is very linear. And I realise that painting does not have a linear structure, but the synchronicity in painting is super compelling for your thought process.”[5]

In Untitled No. 1026, paint runs give the work a sense of gravity, a top and bottom. Yet, the spraypainted areas counteract this effect, drawing the viewer up and across, creating a satisfying, never fully resolvable visual play. This is an effect of both the masking and spraying techniques used, and the artist’s choice of colour. Grosse states, “I like this anarchic potential of colour. I see it very clearly that colour is actually taking away the boundary of the object, so there is no subject-object relationship anymore.”6

Two untitled acrylic paintings on paper also appear in this catalogue. These works have much more of a grid-like, linear structure than Untitled No. 1026. Through deft composition and colour selection, they present almost meditative studies on the effectiveness of line and contrast. Where Untitled No. 1026 is anarchic, these two paintings are measured, though they retain visual complexity.

Over the past three and half decades, Grosse has developed a practice that challenges the very axioms of painting, disrupting conventions of how the artform is understood. Consequently, her work has been exhibited in highly regarded international contexts and is held in many of the world’s most esteemed collections.

Julian McKinnon


1. “Katharina Grosse” Gagosian.com, https://gagosian.com/artists/k....
2. An example of this is her 2016 work Rockaway, which involved transforming an abandoned New York military building into an artwork.
Grosse spraypainted the building and its surrounds to create an immersive artwork. In such works as these, one can draw parallels between her paintings and the 1970s land art of American artist Robert Smithson.
3. Anne Ring Peterson, “Painting Spaces” in Contemporary Painting in Context Anne Ring Peterson, ed. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), 132.
4. Ibid.
5. Art 21. “Katharina Grosse: Painting with Color” April 18, 2015. 4 mins 40 seconds. Quote 1:18–1:36.
6. Ibid. 3:04–3:17

Featured in Minimal Opulence: The Gary Langsford and Vicki Vuleta Collection, Tuesday 19 September