“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.
Rio de Janeiro native Ernesto Neto is often quoted as saying, “I am sculpture and think as sculpture.” Neto’s been exhibiting internationally since the 1990s, and the artist’s latest biomorphic work is a natural evolution of that oft-cited quote, tailored to the spaces each piece inhabits. From a distance, these new, vibrant installations appear as though they grew inside these walls organically. But Neto’s work isn’t meant to be enjoyed from afar.
South Korean artist Lee Bul creates sculptures and installations that move between dystopian techno-monsters and objects pulled from ruinous cityscapes. Emerging out of the late 1980s, Bul has examined urbanization, mythology, and societal “progress” in major exhibitions and shows. Earlier this year, she nabbed the annual, prestigious Ho-Am Prize.