Katharina Grosse

For this painting Grosse turned her stretched and partly painted canvas to the horizontal axis and partially submerged it in soil that she had had unloaded, by the truckload, onto her studio floor. The work’s green-yellow field took shape while the canvas was in this position, with the submerged lower left section masked from both the artist’s view and any further marking. The painting effectively materialized as a sculptural form embedded in a sea of elemental relations and effects. Its larger color field was worked on over weeks using multiple layers of paint, its relation to the partly painted and submerged section becoming increasingly uncertain. Finally, the canvas was extracted from the soil and washed. Only with this extraction did Grosse view the work in its entirety and select the vertical orientation that we see today.