Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Katharina Grosse Challenges Perceptions of Painting and Space in New Works

"Painting doesn't follow the rules of architectural space; it has a totally different set of rules. Why should it then behave exactly according to those rules?" This is the question that German artist Katharina Grosse asks herself as she creates her colorful explosions over earth, objects and canvas. Her works, previously covered here, are raw and produced quickly with little else besides the artist's spray gun.  The way that Grosse arranges colors has been recently studied in Gagosian Gallery of London's massive survey of Spray Art. Whether she is creating an outdoor installation or painting on canvas, all of her pieces are site specific, as in her latest exhibition, "The Smoking Kid," which closed over the weekend at König Gallerie in Berlin.

“Painting doesn’t follow the rules of architectural space; it has a totally different set of rules. Why should it then behave exactly according to those rules?” This is the question that German artist Katharina Grosse asks herself as she creates her colorful explosions over earth, objects and canvas. Her works, previously covered here, are raw and produced quickly with little else besides the artist’s spray gun.  The way that Grosse arranges colors has been recently studied in Gagosian Gallery of London’s massive survey of Spray Art. Whether she is creating an outdoor installation or painting on canvas, all of her pieces are site specific, as in her latest exhibition, “The Smoking Kid,” which closed over the weekend at König Gallerie in Berlin. Her exhibit presented a series of new paintings pointing outwards towards the entrance of the space. They portray the same sort of cracks or fractures that one could find in Grosse’s larger installations, which reconsider our sense of physical space and movement in a new context. To her, paintings are another way of looking at 2D space, where the image and thought come together to form something deeper than a measurable, 3D space. How a painting appears in its environment is important to the viewer’s experience. This is also how Grosse approached her largest installation to date, now on view at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. The result is a “living picture” that visitors can move through, composed of soil and trees painted with bright permutations of color. Take a look at more of Katharina Grosse’s latest works below.

Meta
Related Articles
Handcrafted with charcoal pencils and sticks on white paper, Marina Fridman's massive installation "Omniscient Body" is actually a single, enormous drawing. The piece, at 74-feet-by-14-feet, is installed at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, as part of the artist's MFA thesis exhibition. The celestial forms offer a chance "to approach the celestial body of Mars at their own scale, to be towered over by one of the rings of Saturn, and to look up at planet Earth and the Moon as though from a great distance."
José Luis Torres is an Argentinean artist currently living in Quebec who builds largescale works out of salvaged objects. He's set up public art installations and sculptures all over the world, using everything from antique doors, window panes, to assemblages of brightly colored plastic as his materials. Often, his works have an overflowing effect as they burst from existing environments and architectural structures. His latest work entitled "Overflows" is a part of the 2015 Passages Insolites (Unusual Passages) event in Quebec City’s Old Port.
Attaboy's "Cradle of Life" installation, which premiered at the “Art of the Mushroom” group show at Compound Gallery last year, is now headed to the the LA Art Show on Jan. 23-27. It will be part of the Littletopia section of the event. The Hi-Fructose co-founder designed the work as rideable, and as you can see below, revelers at the Compound Gallery events took him up on the opportunity.
To step inside a creation by The Very Many is to briefly cross over into an alien world. The New York City-based studio, led by French artist-architect Marc Fornes, makes installations and environments that can feel both functional and purely aesthetic. The studio says its specialization is “computational design and digital fabrication,” though the results can feel organic in nature. Fornes was last featured on HiFructose.com here.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List