Curator Kathleen Bühler

Katharina Grosse is internationally celebrated for her large-scale, on-site works that she paints across environments. To date, less focus has been placed on her studio-based paintings. Powerful to behold, Grosse’s studio paintings prompt heightened sensory experiences through their dramatic colors. Complex layers of paint and color unsettle relations between surface and subsurface, above and below, visible and invisible; sweeping, expansive movements continue beyond the edge of the canvas; and fluid, abstract forms return and recur as new formations. 

Since the late 1980s Grosse developed a radically open, non programmatic, and non categorical approach that has defined her unique artistic position ever since. She rethinks and challenges foundational concerns at the heart of the medium of painting, including the notion of a painting as a discrete, singular object and living index of artistic subjectivity, and the act of painting as independent from the social fabric of the everyday. Grosse conceives of painting as a prototype of human activity, akin to the ways we act in, relate to, and experience the world. She experiments with processes and tools that restrain artistic authorship and control. She revises and reinvents the textures, shapes, surfaces, and color combinations of earlier works in her ongoing experimentation with paints, colors, and other players on the canvas such as stencils. She also works on several paintings at once and she incorporates bits and pieces of nature into the paintings. With this extensive testing of the boundaries of painting Grosse opens the artwork up to the world and vice versa. Featuring 43 paintings and three prints on fabric, this exhibition is the first in Switzerland to offer a comprehensive look at Grosse's innovative approach to abstract painting. 

Born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, in 1961, Katharina Grosse has held professorships at Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her art is in public and private collections around the world, and she is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. She lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand.

Ruptures and Fissures

The structure of the exhibition is modeled after Katharina Grosse’s formal yet open-ended painterly process. While the paintings on view span all three decades of her career, they are presented not chronologically but in relation to one another, offering a close look at her evolving practice shaped by returns, revisions, and inventions and her interventions into the medium of painting.

This section of the exhibition illuminates the various ways Katharina Grosse ruptures the medium of painting to question its autonomy and to stretch its boundaries in order to interlace it with the social fabric of the world. Qualities endemic to painting fuse with external realms, such as when she extracts a fragment of an on-site painting and designates it a work on its own, like a quasi-readymade.

Through the use of stencils Grosse creates voids that become active elements in the painting while also limiting the artist’s control over her field of vision. As much as blank areas can take over large parts of a work, together with the painted layers they also create overpopulated surfaces, excesses, or maximizations—an impenetrable web of intersubjective forms. This collage-like method also results in paintings within paintings that visualize fragmentation and disorientation. More recently the artist has produced slashed canvases—colorful fragments that fall freely and in actual layers, some of them extending onto the floor. Voids between them reveal the white wall onto which the work is mounted, recalling the earlier stencils that create empty spaces on the canvas. Furthermore, her use of natural materials (soil, seaweed) and her own feet, albeit covered with rubber plates, to apply paint creates uncertainty and visualizes the unanticipated. In recent spray paintings she also intermingles nature and culture. By adhering tree branches to the canvas, for example, she provocatively stages a natural object as something artificial, upending common analogies of art and nature. In related paintings she affixes branches into the wet paint then removes them, recording their imprints. In such ways she accords nature with a latent presence that resonates as enigmatic.

Returns, Revisions, Inventions

From the beginning of her artistic practice, Katharina Grosse has developed an aesthetic language of organic, often semi-geometric forms that return transformed in sometimes subtle, sometimes radical ways to create new painterly inventions. To visualize these formations she has experimented with a variety of methods throughout her career. In 1998 she began using a spraying technique; in the 2010s she introduced the use of stencils; and in 2020 she started working with slashed canvases. The exhibition Katharina Grosse. Studio Paintings, 1988–2022. Returns, Revisions, Inventions comprises paintings executed over the years that highlight this cyclical approach. Through this process-based method Grosse increasingly entangles past, present, and future so that distinct notions of narrated, lived, and envisioned time are inseparable from each other. We can see horizontal color bands as well as vertical ones. We can also see how these bands and stripes have transformed over the years while at the same time being revisited over again. Some are strictly rectilinear, others have organic, irregular, or curvilinear shapes. The paint is applied in various thicknesses; some coatings are more transparent, others more opaque. These strokes of color are painted in layers in which above and beneath are visible at once and often appear indistinct. Without completely discarding conventional hierarchies but by destabilizing them, this method of interlocking painted layers on and beyond the canvas also opens up spaces from which to imagine new ways of being and perceiving, invoking alternative structures for social realities. Through the connections of likeness and difference an active, conscious, and, importantly, indefinite spectatorial experience is mobilized, encouraging shifting perceptions and the continuous discernment of diversities.

Exhibition: 

Katharina Grosse. Studio Paintings, 1988 – 2022. Returns, Revisions, Inventions

The exhibition is organised by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (St. Louis, USA) in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Bern. It is curated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator; the presentation at the Kunstmuseum Bern is curated by Kathleen Bühler. 

Stations:

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA
23.09.2022 – 23.01.2023

Kunstmuseum Bern
03.03. – 25.06.2023

Kunstmuseum Bonn
25.04. – 01.09.2024

Main sponsor:

Credit Suisse has been a partner of the Kunstmuseum Bern since 1996 and supports the exhibition "Katharina Grosse" as main sponsor.

Sponsors & Partners: 

Media partner: 

Courtesy: 

If not noted otherwise, Courtesy Studio Katharina Grosse
Design walltexts: Salzmann Gertsch 
Production Digital Guide: NETNODE AG 

Team Studio Katharina Grosse:

Head of Studio: Natalija Martinovic
Project Manager: Hans Grosse
Head of Workshop and Registrar: Simon Menner
Office Management: Ivonne Schwarz
Head of Publications: Kristin Rieber
Archive: Anja Majer
Project Assistants: Alexander Bacon, Marco Funke, Lukasz Furs,
Annika Kleist, Marc Märzhäuser, William Nicholson, Barbara Prenka,
Arne Schreiber, Anja Schwörer
Social Media: Maximiliane Kolle

Team Kunstmuseum Bern:

Director: Nina Zimmer
Managing Director Thomas Soraperra
Head of Facility Management: Bernhard Spycher
Chief Curator: Kathleen Bühler
Curatorial Assistant: Marlene Wenger
Sponsoring: Birgit Achatz
Registrars: Franziska Vassella, Rebecca Birrer
Head of Exhibition Management: René Wochner
Technical Services: Roman Studer, Martin Schnidrig, Raphael Frey, Mike Carol, Peter Thöni, David Brühlmann, Markus Ingold, Volker Thies
Head of Conservation & Restauration: Nathalie Bäschlin
Restauration: Katharina Sautter, Matthias Läuchli, Katja Friese
Head of Communication &: Marketing: Anne-Cécile Foulon
Project Management Digital Guide: Martin Stadelmann
Graphic Design: Jeannine Moser
Marketing: Katrina Weissenborn, Noëlle Gogniat, Cédric Zubler, David Oester
Art Education: Magdalena Schindler, Etienne Wismer, Anina Büschlen

Contact:

KUNSTMUSEUM BERN
Hodlerstrasse 12, CH-3011 Bern
T +41 (0)31 328 09 44
info@kunstmuseumbern.ch
kunstmuseumbern.ch/katharinagrosse

Social Media:

Instagram
Facebook
Youtube

Catalogue:

The bilingual exhibition catalog in German and English by publisher Hatje Cantz is available in the shop for CHF 45.

Accompanying Program:

The Color Maze
Friday, March 17, 2023, 6:00 p.m. – 11:00 p.m., as part of the Museum Night. Workshop participants and a team are building a colorful labyrinth made of cardboard and light effects especially for the Museum Night of the Kunstmuseum Bern. Who finds the way?

From the museum night, access to the Labyrinth during the exhibition every Wednesday from 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. for a limited number of visitors possible and on request. Information on all public and private tours, workshops and offers for families and schools: T +41 (0)31 328 09 11, kunstmuseumbern.ch/learn 

Film Screening

Think Big! – The Artist Katharina Grosse
A film by Claudia Müller, 2020, 45 Min.

© Phlox Films Claudia Müller 2020
Direction and Production: Claudia Müller
Camera: René Dame, Axel Fischer, Christoph Lerch
Cut: Anette Fleming