Katharina Grosse

Grosse works primarily in Germany and New Zealand. For some of the paintings made at her studio in New Zealand she applied strands of seaweed and kelp before and during the process of spraying mists of paint over the canvas. In this painting, after the paint settled and dried, the artist carefully removed the seaweed. As a result, we see writhing, luminous, enigmatic ribbons—some finer, others thicker—that interact with larger sprayed forms. The organic forms also reveal the colors of earlier layers of paint. The strands are markers of the residual presence of these elemental materials, evoking to some degree the disappearance of nature but also its energetic presence.