Katharina Grosse

In this work, sprayed ribbons of green, red, blue, and yellow extend vertically across the painting surface. A bushy branch has been hung on the right side of the painting with the assistance of cut canvas and has also been sprayed with paint. In employing a painted branch, the artist demonstrates the ability of paint to both connect things and eliminate differences between the painterly events and the pictorial environment. Her use of the branch enables her to merge non-representational painting with something that everyone is familiar with and can name, to connect the abstract, so to speak, with something realistic. As a kind of counterforce to her compositional arrangement, the tangle of twigs opposes the rhythmically repeating lines. The painting and the natural materials create a friction and disrupt conventional categories of thought.