Katharina Grosse's work is characterized by an anarchic impulse. Since the beginning of the 1990s, she has been working on a pictorial form that disregards fixed boundaries and hierarchies. For the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Grosse has created a new group of works. The title of the show, "shadowbox", gives rise to multilayered associations: from shadowboxing, to a kind of negative form of the white cube, all the way to the display.
Four oversized, concave ellipses face each other leaning against the interior walls of the Kunsthalle. The front sides of the heavy picture mediums made of laminated rigid foam are covered with Grosse's characteristic spray painting. Since they are also perforated or cut, and visitors can walk around them, the supporting walls remain visible.
The sculptural forms rise almost all the way up to the art hall's nine-meter-high ceiling joists. According to Grosse, the issue is not color, spectacular spatial experiences or performance, but rather "to open up a performative space of thought in which everyone can perceive reality in a different way: without notions of good and evil, without hierarchies and borders." The "shadowbox" is an open system. "Painting, thinking and acting in it means that there is no longer a reality that is more real than potentiality. Reality is thus updated in the possibilities of each individual at all times."
In this way, the audience is included in an aesthetic event in which qualities of experiencing architecture, sculpture and panel painting merge in one object. Hence, imagination and facts, illusion and abstraction, potentialities and realities cease to form opposite principles. It is precisely their coexistence that lends Grosse's artistic work relevance within the larger social frame as well. For it offers perception - and cognition - a horizon of experience that goes beyond fixed ideas and unambiguous categories of mental and social stagnation. Grosse's art impressively contradicts the belief that we must anchor our notions of the world and of ourselves in unshakable basic principles.
Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau) lives and works in Berlin.
Her expansive installations have been on view in large solo exhibitions, among others, at FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2008); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2007); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2007); De Appel, Amsterdam (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall (2004); Berlinische Galerie (2003); Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2002). This year she will additionally exhibit at the Neues Museum Nürnberg and the Museum for Moderne Kunst, Arken.
She has also participated in important group exhibitions including Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin. Die Kunst zweier Städte, Neue Nationalgalerie / Mori Art Museum (2006); Taipei Biennial (2006); deutschemalereizweitausenddrei, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003); 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2002).
Katharina Grosse was awarded the Fred-Thieler-Preis 2003, and since 2000 holds a professorship at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin.
CURATOR
Dr. Katja Blomberg (Artistic Advisory Board of Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin and Director of the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin)
Four oversized, concave ellipses face each other leaning against the interior walls of the Kunsthalle. The front sides of the heavy picture mediums made of laminated rigid foam are covered with Grosse's characteristic spray painting. Since they are also perforated or cut, and visitors can walk around them, the supporting walls remain visible.
The sculptural forms rise almost all the way up to the art hall's nine-meter-high ceiling joists. According to Grosse, the issue is not color, spectacular spatial experiences or performance, but rather "to open up a performative space of thought in which everyone can perceive reality in a different way: without notions of good and evil, without hierarchies and borders." The "shadowbox" is an open system. "Painting, thinking and acting in it means that there is no longer a reality that is more real than potentiality. Reality is thus updated in the possibilities of each individual at all times."
In this way, the audience is included in an aesthetic event in which qualities of experiencing architecture, sculpture and panel painting merge in one object. Hence, imagination and facts, illusion and abstraction, potentialities and realities cease to form opposite principles. It is precisely their coexistence that lends Grosse's artistic work relevance within the larger social frame as well. For it offers perception - and cognition - a horizon of experience that goes beyond fixed ideas and unambiguous categories of mental and social stagnation. Grosse's art impressively contradicts the belief that we must anchor our notions of the world and of ourselves in unshakable basic principles.
Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau) lives and works in Berlin.
Her expansive installations have been on view in large solo exhibitions, among others, at FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2008); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2007); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2007); De Appel, Amsterdam (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall (2004); Berlinische Galerie (2003); Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2002). This year she will additionally exhibit at the Neues Museum Nürnberg and the Museum for Moderne Kunst, Arken.
She has also participated in important group exhibitions including Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin. Die Kunst zweier Städte, Neue Nationalgalerie / Mori Art Museum (2006); Taipei Biennial (2006); deutschemalereizweitausenddrei, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003); 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2002).
Katharina Grosse was awarded the Fred-Thieler-Preis 2003, and since 2000 holds a professorship at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin.
CURATOR
Dr. Katja Blomberg (Artistic Advisory Board of Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin and Director of the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin)
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