Katharina Grosse

Many of Grosse’s paintings adapt the structure of a grid, a familiar form for plotting data in science and industry. In this grid, however, curves replace rigid lines. Drips of paint provide additional contours in a complicated mesh of colors. Neon tones of pink and yellow stand out forcefully, even where overpainted by dark green. Only the opaque pastel pink overcomes, and conceals, segments of the neon curves where they intersect. The billowing optical effects of so many overlaid lines make it difficult to precisely distinguish layers except along borders of the composition, where streaks of paint end without crossing the edges of the canvas. In the upper left corner the grid dissolves and only the horizontal lines remain.