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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
"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.
German urban artist Katharina Grosse doesn’t limit her vibrant artworks to a wall- she colors the world around her. Color is absolutely essential to her graffiti that covers buildings, mounds of dirt, and installations that evoke natural wonders like the Northern Lights. Her strokes don’t follow the contours of the chosen environment. They follow that of her own hand as she moves through the space, telling an abstract, emotional narrative. If it looks as though she hovered over the Earth with a spray gun, you would be right. Grosse’s process often involves dangerously leaning over scaffolding or being suspended from a crane. Throughout her career, her materials have varied from the conventional to unconventional; acrylic on canvas paintings and gallery walls to plastic and styrofoam alien-like formations. See more of her work after the jump.