卡塔琳娜格罗斯
קתרינה גרוס
カタリーナグロッセ
카타리나 그로
КАТАРИНЫ ГРОССЕ

Rockaway!
MoMA PS1

source: dezeen

A condemned structure on a New York beach has been transformed into an artwork using brightly coloured spray paint by German artist Katharina Grosse (+ slideshow).

The intervention – titled Rockaway! – envelops the aquatics building at Fort Tilden, a former United States Army base on the Rockaway Point peninsula at the southwest tip of Queens.

The small building was deemed structurally unsafe in 2013 following Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the area, and is set to be demolished later this year.

Before destruction, Grosse used a palette of reds, oranges, pinks and white influenced by the area’s dramatic sunsets to turn the building into an art installation.

The paint covers the building’s cracked external walls and holey gabled roof, as well the interior surfaces and open window frames. It also extends onto the surrounding sandy ground.

Colours are blended together to create an effect similar to wispy clouds and tidal washes.

Grosse is known for using spray paint to transform both indoor and outdoor spaces, at a range of scales. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she covered an abandoned property in New Orleans with orange paint.

Her latest project was commissioned by Queens-based art museum MoMA PS1, the sister institution to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

“In 2008, I saw Katharina Grosse’s work for Prospect 1 in New Orleans, where she painted a small house that was abandoned and condemned after Hurricane Katrina,” said PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach. “I was deeply moved that a building just waiting to be taken down was given this temporary, proud and fragile beauty.”

“When I heard that the aquatics building in Fort Tilden was to be demolished following Hurricane Sandy, I immediately wanted to invite Katharina to do a project at the site,” he added.

Also this summer, MoMA PS1 has enlisted architects Escobedo Soliz to weave colourful ropes across the courtyard at its main venue in Long Island City.

Other artists and designers to have worked with abandoned spaces include Charles Pétillon, who fills them with white balloons.

ReMIX Studio created a string installation that guided visitors through a derelict building to a pop-up restaurant in Beijing, while Aaron Asis tied over 2,000 metres of blue cord across Philadelphia’s disused St Andrew’s Collegiate Chapel.

Photography is by Pablo Enriquez, courtesy of the artist and MoMA PS1.
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source: artnews

onning a spacesuit-like outfit, complete with a breathing apparatus, the German artist Katharina Grosse blasts vivid, florescent-hued paint over huge chunks of architecture, dirt piles, sheets, jagged sculptural forms, plastic, and, sure, canvas. The results are exhilarating—hallucinogenic fields of colors that melt space, reshaping how one perceives the world. They are Helen Frankenthalers or Sam Gilliams primed for an era of virtual-reality technology. Fifty-five this year, Grosse is one of the great painters of the past quarter-century, but she remains too little seen in the United States.

Grosse has appeared here almost exclusively, and then only rarely, in museums and in public projects. There was an action-packed disco of a painting installation organized by the Public Art Fund in Brooklyn in 2013, and the next year a sprawling mural (an inadequate word, to be sure) along the train tracks in Philadelphia that covered nearby buildings, walls, and the ground with swirls of paint. It actually justified an Amtrak trip, which is no small thing. Now she has alighted once again, along the beach at Fort Tilden in Queens, taking as her surface a long, one-floor cinderblock building damaged during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 that is slated for demolition.

It is tricky to spot the piece, titled Rockaway! and presented by MoMA PS1, walking along the beach, away from the hipster food stalls of Jacob Riis Park. The roof peeks above the sand dunes, but one recent morning I saw only hazy red lines hovering somewhere off in the distance, going in and out of focus, and even as I got close, it was difficult to make out the scene. Grosse has spread diagonal streaks in a restrained array of white, magenta, and red-orange (applied, at first pass, in that order)—the white streaks blended in with the cloudy sky, and the whole thing worked as dazzle camouflage for the structure. (This palette is in sharp contrast to some of her other recent work, like her virtuoso, no-holds-barred outing at the 2015 Venice Biennale.)

Grosse has also lit up most of the inside of the building with healthy doses of paint. There are white curves that end in sharp edges, washes of that red-orange (the work’s dominant color), and hits of magenta. Being inside felt a bit like being shrunk down to a tiny size and placed in a Terry Winters painting—seemingly contradictory patterns interlocking and setting the whole world in motion. Sand, untouched by even a speck of paint, covers the floor, throwing the skeletal structure’s adornment into sharp relief.

Outside, the color cascades onto asphalt poured in front of the building, but it always stops the moment it reaches that sand. It touches only the built environment. Grosse’s is an art of intricate framing—she makes radical gestures that appear wildly expressionistic only at first glance. The key to her piece, for me, is that she has not quite covered the entire building. Raw wall, with spray painted graffiti of its own, peeks through here and there, and its back remains untouched, as if her work is a wave crashing onto the beach or a cloud coasting along the ground—here one moment, gone the next. For now, it holds the building in a bewitching embrace.
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source: cajitadeartistasblogspot
Nació en Alemania en 1961. en la actualidad vive y trabaja en Düsseldorf y Berlín.
Estudió en la Kunst Akademie de Münster, bajo la tutela de Johannes Brus y Norbert Tadeusz desde 1982 hasta 1986 y en la Kunst Akademie de Düsseldorf bajo la tutela de Goddhard Graubner desde 1986 a 1990.
En 1999 fue artista en residencia en la Fundación Chinati en Texas, Estados Unidos.
En el 2000 enseñó en la Kunsthschule en Berlín-Weisse.
Ha expuesto individualmente en la galería Sfeir-Semler en Hamburgo, Alemania, en la galería Sara Cottier en Sidney, Australia y en el Museo Art Sonje de Corea del Sur.
Los colores que ella emplea son mucho más intensos de lo que uno espera de las pinturas tradicionales. Son intencionalmente no naturales, sintéticos a la vista, fluorescentes, incluso cosméticos.
La característica de estas pinturas es que son un evento único influido por la situación arquitectónica, geográfica y social. Cada proyecto es un descubrimiento no sólo para el observador sino que también para el artista.
La presencia del proceso en sí mismo, la evidencia material de su interacción con la obra dejan evidencia de lo que ocurrió en el lugar de la acción.
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source: one360eu
La peinture de l’allemande Katharina Grosse est un travail dans l’atelier complété par des interventions in situ à travers le monde. C’est un échange entre deux configurations qui se développent simultanément.
Katharina Grosse est née en 1961 à Fribourg (Allemagne). Elle vit et travaille à Dusseldorf et à Berlin. Depuis octobre 2000, elle enseigne à l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Berlin-Weissensee. Depuis 1998, elle utilise la technique de pulvérisation des couleurs à l’aide d’un pistolet à peinture de carrossiers. Le spectateur se trouve directement immergé dans la couleur de Katharina Grosse.
L’artiste peint en laissant la plus grande place à l’improvisation et aux circonstances extérieures, elle provoque des accidents, laisse le hasard décider selon le cadre et l’instant. Avec ses interventions in situ, Katharina Grosse entre dans l’espace le temps d’une expérience physiologiques sur les murs, le sol ou le plafond, en rajoutant parfois des éléments volumineux.
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source: artinamericamagazine
MASS MANY EUROPEANS THINK OF AMERICA in terms of vast landscapes and infinite sky, and urban centers packed with towering buildings and teeming masses, all in a rather precarious state of flux. The sprawling and spectacular site-specific exhibition by German artist Katharina Grosse at MASS MoCA, “One Floor Up More Highly,” seems to reflect this view. Organized by the museum’s curator Susan Cross, the show could be seen as an homage to an idealized if not wholly fictional place, such as the American frontier. But it soon proves to be a multifaceted installation, inviting myriad interpretations.
This project, like most of Grosse’s large-scale installations, incorporates massive sculptural features that
allude simultaneously to empirical space and an imaginative vista. Yet the artist’s primary means of expression is painting, and the thrust of the work is rigorously abstract. She employs painting’s illusionistic devices of light and shadow, and, with a subtle manipulation of other elements, suggests complex narratives. Over the past decade, she has developed a unique working method and a singular approach to painting that has taken the medium far beyond its traditional domain.
Grosse typically designs intricate but ramshackle constructions using mounds of dirt, found objects and fabricated abstract shapes in wood, Styrofoam or plastic. Once the tableau is in place, she dons protective gear that resembles a hazmat suit and wields an industrial spray gun. She moves through the environment—usually on foot, but sometimes on scaffolding or suspended from a crane—covering almost everything in her path with brilliant, saturated color. Occasionally, she coats the gallery’s furniture, walls, windows and ceiling, incorporating the architecture into the art.
Grosse’s rather novel practice has been compared to graffiti and street art. More convincingly, she commingles the diverse tactics of artists such as Robert Smithson (in his earthworks) and Jules Olitski (in his misty Color Field canvases) to create something startlingly new. A large part of her practice is performative, albeit without much of an audience. Since she uses a compressor to keep the paint moving, she must act quickly and deliberately to complete the work. Unlike the Action Painters or Expressionists, with their convulsive brushwork and gestures, Grosse never comes into direct contact with the surfaces. Her physical if not psychological detachment seems related to Conceptual art. However, her technique involves a machismo stance, with aggression modified by a kind of opulent sensuality.
BORN IN FREIBURG/BREISGAU in 1961, Grosse studied with Gotthard Graubner at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Works by Gerhard Richter and Nam June Paik were early influences. She currently teaches at the Kunstakademie, even though several years ago she relocated to Berlin. She now lives and works much of the time in a striking Bauhaus-style home and studio in Berlin’s old city center that she commissioned from architects Ute Frank and Georg Augustin.
Her early paintings, from the late 1980s and early ’90s, are spare gestural compositions that at times recall Mark Rothko’s work or, more closely, the Zenlike, brushy late abstractions of Hans Hartung. Attracted to shaped canvases and unconventional materials, Grosse experimented with unusual painting supports ranging from found objects to a lightweight resin material used for surfboards. In some sense her work is akin to postwar movements such as the French Supports/Surfaces, in its approach to abstract-painting-as-object, as well as Arte Povera, in its use of abject materials.
Grosse’s art blossomed and her career took off when, in 1998, she began adding passages of spray paint onto canvases and directly onto gallery walls. Growing increasingly bold and elaborate over the past decade, Grosse’s large-scale installations, which she has been invited to produce in many parts of the world, have brought her significant notice. Her first in the U.S., at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in 2001, was widely praised in the art press, as were subsequent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2006), and the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2007). Her untitled work for the 2008 New Orleans biennial, Prospect.1, garnered considerable attention and was reproduced in numerous art publications, including this one [A.i.A., Feb. ’09]. Amid post-Katrina devastation, she covered a derelict home in sweeping sprays of yellow and orange-red to suggest that it was on fire.
The most ambitious installation Grosse has produced in the U.S. to date, “One Floor Up More Highly”—whose title comes from a phrase scrawled on a building, directing patients to a dentist’s office near Grosse’s Berlin studio—is an interrelated, multipart work that fills three enormous galleries. The largest section is a rather theatrical panorama situated on the ground floor of the former textile mill. Stepping into the cavernous gallery of MASS MoCA’s Building 5—about the size of a football field—viewers encounter hills, valleys and mountains. Pathways allow easy passage and offer numerous vantage points to view this peculiar and richly varied terrain. Visitors are dwarfed by tall slabs of unpainted white Styrofoam rising some 30 feet. Sliced and shaped with a hot wire into pointy stalagmites or giant crystals, the pieces also evoke sections of collapsed skyscrapers, or even more closely, crumbling glaciers.
The jagged white slabs thrust skyward from waist-high mounds of dirt, studded with real twigs, gravel and rocks. These, plus huge resin boulders, are all spray-painted in great swathes of outlandish hues: hot pink, deep red-orange, Day-Glo green, yellow and blue. The piles of sprayed dirt have the rich density of tons of dried pigment, a feature that recalls certain Yves Klein works of the 1950s.
The overall image conveys the sense of awe that one feels in response to nature, like paintings by 19th-century German Romantics. Specifically, the work calls to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s majestic 1823-24 painting of a ship wreck in the arctic, The Sea of Ice, in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This painting of a doomed expedition imparts a sense of tragic beauty not unlike the mood Grosse establishes. Her wildly colorful environment indicates an abstract, phantasmagoric mindscape that might offer a transcendent experience. At the very least, “One Floor Up More Highly” invites a sustained reverie. In order to arrive at that state, however, the viewer traversing the space is obliged to accept a visual, intellectual and physical engagement with the work. Grosse’s installation is most effective as it envelops viewers in a kaleidoscopic fusion of color, form, rhythm and texture.
In the middle of one long wall, sprays of red, blue and purple rise from the floor to cover rows of high windows. The translucent acrylic allows highlights of color to further enliven the space in the manner of stained glass. At first unnoticed, tangled wads of clothing appear throughout Grosse’s installation, including sweaters, pants and shirts wedged between rocks or partially buried under the dirt, all garishly painted over. Despite the high tones, the gnarled garments imply something sinister. Conjuring disappeared bodies and unknown human remains left behind after some calamity, the ragged clothing adds an abrupt note of discord to the lush environment, and a hint of despair.
Literally embedded in the landscape, the perplexing details provoke considerable consternation. What has happened here? Where are we? Are we confronting the past, present or future? The overall design suggests the scene of a momentous event, but whether apocalyptic or regenerative remains a matter of speculation. What is clear is the unexpected emotional impact these garments give to the entire installation. What initially appeared rather simply as Grosse’s witty and fanciful cosmic playground suddenly implies a narrative with darker connotations—the aftermath of war or an environmental catastrophe, as examples. It could be the site of a nuclear disaster, where everything still glows with a sort of radioactive aura. Providing no specific answers, the artist leaves the viewer to conjure his or her own scenario.
In a counterpoint, Grosse, with a sizable dose of humor, adds a passage of quiet respite. A long bench, in the form of a wooden plank traversing a large mound of bright red dirt, allows visitors to rest and contemplate the view, as one would in a nature preserve. Across from the bench, one of Grosse’s large, shaped abstract compositions lies on the floor. Painted with sprays and splashes of yellow, green and red on a thick white panel made of surfboard material (glass-fiber-reinforced plastic), the concave, elliptical object recalls a giant kite or stylized airplane wings.
MOVING FROM THE MAIN GALLERY into a smaller room with lower ceilings, visitors enter an entirely different realm of Grosse’s invention. This space appears enclosed like a large basement or a warehouse. Broad passages of paint in fluorescent pink, viridian green, purple, orange and lime seem more urban and graffitilike than those in the larger gallery. They cover the floor, walls and ceiling, suggesting the interior of a tacky nightclub after the crowd has gone home and the lights have been turned up.
Articles of clothing appear again—T-shirts, underwear and slacks—this time strewn about the floor and covered with paint. Once again these disembodied garments spark broad and unsettling speculation. Perhaps they belonged to hedonists who disrobed during a heated, drug-fueled rave. Or is this evidence found at a crime scene: murder at the disco, perhaps, or a shoot-out at the bar?
At the far end of the room, seven tall, white rectangular shapes on the wall stand out against a florid background of neon green, blue and bright red. Made with stencils that blocked the spray, the rectangles appear like doors or windows, an illusionistic device to suggest the source of light that fills the room. The painted doorways imply a world beyond the gallery, like portals to a fictive space. Near the last rectangle, in front of an actual doorway, narrow passages of white look like beams of light cast on the floor. They help guide visitors toward the door, out of the room and up a tall staircase, at the top of which one finds yet another imaginative environment.
This upper gallery, smaller than the others, is a kind of terrace overlooking the main space. From here, the view of the vast installation below is arresting. And, on this upper level, the scope of Grosse’s vision becomes apparent. The works here may be seen either as a summation or an introduction to her art. On view are finely wrought examples of the three principal types of works that have preoccupied her for the past decade: installations, three-dimensional paintings and more conventional wall-hung canvases.
A kind of abbreviated version of the ground floor installation, a mound of dirt and twigs at the center of the gallery is sprayed luminous shades of blue, orange and yellow. Bundles of clothing poke out from the mound. Placed horizontally on the floor, an enormous convex panel painted mostly red looks like a stylized surfboard 15 feet long. It partially covers the colorful pile of debris. The elliptical work corresponds to the concave panel piece integrated into the first-floor installation. It also relates to a series of huge shaped paintings that Grosse recently created as permanent public works in Germany.
One such piece, an approximately 30-foot-high convex oval composition in purple and green, was installed last year on the facade of the Johanneskirche, a 19th-century Baroque-style Protestant church in downtown Düsseldorf.
More traditional in format, if not in image and design, a single, untitled canvas from 2010, an approximately 8-by-6-foot rectangle, represents the third group of works. Using sprays, pours and stencils, Grosse suggests here an undulating, fractured field of purple, red and gold. Though abstract, the painting echoes the collagelike layering found in some of James Rosenquist’s deconstructed images. The only wall-hung work in the show, the painting appears as a solitary icon on the otherwise empty back wall. The canvas bears a contradictorily grand and elegiac demeanor as if emblematic of the evolution of abstract painting. It also serves as a key to the entire exhibition, since it brings Grosse’s endeavor full circle. She transmutes the abstract visual language that began with paintings by artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky and Kupka in the early years of the 20th century and makes it intelligible and practical in the 21st century.
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source: propublicartru
Тысячи офисных работников центрального Бруклина должны поблагодарить художницу из Берлина Катарину Гроссе. Своей работой «Только мы двое», выполненной по заказу фонда Public Art Fund во дворе центра MetroTech, она преобразила самую обычную площадь в динамичное и яркое публичное пространство со своим собственным характером. Инсталляция включает в себя две группы из 18 глыб из пластика, укрепленного стекловолокном и покрашенного акриловой краской, нанесенной с помощью пистолета-распылителя, традиционных для Гроссе ярких неоновых цветов. Впечатляющее произведение художницы – одновременно и картина, и скульптура, и инсталляция, приглашающая прохожих исследовать ее закоулки, обнаружить невидные снаружи оттенки, поразмышлять над ее загадочными формами – только не залезая на нее, как гласят окружающие ее знаки (будто бы это будет соблюдаться).
Для творчества Гроссе характерно перенесение картины с полотна на другие поверхности, от стен музеев, метеозондов и мебели до грязи, алюминия и даже целый дома (для работы «Перспектива. 1»). В своей работе «Только мы двое» художница демонстрирует не только удивительный и яркий цветовой спектр, но и множество странных и экспрессивных форм. Меньшая из двух соседствующих фигур указывает на оживленную улицу центра MetroTech, приковывая взоры проходящих работников центра, бегающих спортсменов и прохожих, гуляющих с собаками. Формы, которые перед большинством посетителей предстанут первыми, с их диагональными линиями и красно-бирюзовой палитрой, вызывают ассоциации с обрушенной и обклеенной этикетками греческой колонной и одновременно с фоном из передач MTV времен 80х. Пропорции работы огромны, впечатление усиливается громоздкими формами и необузданной игрой оттенков, которые изменили площадь как ни одно произведение паблик-арта, представленное на ней по сей день. Предыдущие выставки бледнели среди неуклюжих массивов зданий и заурядности окружающей архитектуры, Гроссе же выгодно использует окружение, подавляя его, и в то же время подчеркивая его обаяние, столь редкое и легко упускаемое из виду.
Обходя по кругу меньшую группу форм, зрители обнаруживают часть, более разнообразную и представляющую собой в буквальном смысле гору из глыб, обрубков, балок, желобов, осколков, клиньев и точек из пластика, размещенных бок о бок и друг на друге. Инсталляция располагается посреди рощицы деревьев на площади, стволы и ветки торчат из пробелов в конструкции, их желтые и оранжевые цвета идеально сочетаются с палитрой Гроссе. Частично закрытые проходы позволяют зрителям исследовать инсталляцию поблизости, нагибаясь под возвышающимися частями или протискиваясь в узких местах в стремлении обнаружить скрытые детали цвета и форм. С этой точки зрения конструкция Гроссе меньше похожа на порушенную архитектурную реликвию и больше на нечто из геологии, как массив выхода залежей минералов на поверхность, неровное ледяное поле, разрушенный каньон или торчащие пики горной гряды.
Очертания конструкции могу ассоциироваться с природы, но ее цветовая схема кричаще искусственна, похожие оттенки могут быть найдены в окружающих постройках. Яркий синий цвет на одном из углов работы соответствует цвету проходящего рядом забора; красный как пожарная машина оттенок, особенно выделяющийся в части, наиболее удаленной от главной улицы центра, можно увидеть в архитектурных акцентах соседней библиотеки; ржаво-оранжевые вкрапления, проходящие по всей работе, прекрасно сочетаются с кирпичом офисного здания в южной части площади; а оттенок бирюзового – это более насыщенная версия краски, в которую выкрашены фонарные столбы и лавки площади. Произведение визуально «взрывает» банальную обстановку места, и в то же время эта инсталляция-картина-скульптура выступает связующим звеном между неуклюжими объектами пространства. Изменчивость и неопределенность работы Гроссе, в цвете и форме, делают ее сильным и легко адаптируемым в восприятии паблик-арт произведением. Зрители могут найти тысячу различных смыслов в красочных формах, а дети, несомненно, увидят огромный игровой комплекс, полностью игнорируя знак «Пожалуйста, не взбирайтесь».
Работа Катарины Гроссе «Только мы вдвоем» будет представлена в Бруклине на территории центра MetroTech до 14 сентября 2014.