Grosse Point Blank: Katharina Grosse talks about pushing painting to its limits

For an artist who creates such fantastically large, other-worldly pieces of work by dangling off cranes in industrial suits armed with spray guns, piling up heaps of dirt and painting them until they resemble sherbet-rainbow landscapes and sawing up gargantuan blocks of styrofoam, it’s strange that more people aren’t aware of Katharine Grosse. I spoke to her as she had just returned to her studio after installing WUNDERBLOCK, her latest exhibition in Texas’ Nasher Sculpture Centre. She gushed about the hot weather and the surprising friendliness of the incredibly wealthy art community there. “They are enormously engaged in the arts and they have this kind of amazingly positive approach. Whatever you say they’re like: ‘Great! It’s gonna work out! It’s fantastic! It’s amazing!’ and that is kind of cool, it’s like being showered with super-positive atoms all the time.” We first came across Katharina’s work in 2011 when her show One Floor Up More Highly at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) was bringing unbridled joy to visitors. She had been given free run of the enormous space of MASS MoCA’s Building 5 and turned it into a whole new world unlike anything many gallery-goers had seen before. She piled tonnes of dirt into the space and spray painted it with acid neon colours before crowning it with enormous, spiked styrofoam sculptures (“I highly suggest to carve into styrofoam – it’s really, really cool”) until the space resembled a mythical lunar landscape around which the public could wander and be transported somewhere else entirely. Susan Cross, the curator of visual arts at the gallery, oversaw the creation of One Floor Up More Highly (and has worked in the past with artists such as Spencer Finch, Mary Lum and Fransje Killaars among others). “This show had a huge impact on our visitors,” she remembers. “The colour, the texture, the scale were all intense. And people had very strong responses – real excitement, and wonder.” Susan first encountered Katharina’s installations at a show in New York’s Freidrich Petzel gallery where she had spray painted huge, multi-coloured daubs directly on to the walls, creating the impression that the building was leaking rainbow fluid. Upon seeing it, Susan knew that her site-specific work would be perfect for the cavernous, industrial space of Building 5. “I was initially thrilled by her palette, and by that simple act of painting directly on the wall and the ceiling, ignoring the logic of the space. Her work has an aggressiveness to it as well as some joy and a sense of abandon. All her work has a strong visceral and visual impact, and a thrill to it, though it also reveals many layers. It simultaneously addresses and embraces the tradition that came before her while exploring a new way of looking at things.” It’s interesting that Susan says Katharina’s work – which could be described as futuristic contemporary installation – “embraces the tradition that came before her.” Despite her ability to stretch the word as far as it will go, Katharina is still a self-pronounced painter. She was a late starter, only really picking up a paintbrush in her early 20s as part of a group of enthusiasts who travelled into the countryside to paint. “That’s how I got somehow hooked. Up to that moment I hadn’t done anything with my hands that would produce images or paintings.” That trip proved to be a turning point. “I liked sitting out there in the countryside and actually looking at something and then trying to figure out what you see. The space around you is so vast that it’s truly a 360 degree angle that you’re looking at. Buildings reorganise our views so that was a really interesting experience, just to be outside.” This experience had her hooked, and so she threw herself into the art world. “I studied in a relatively small school in Münster for two or three years then I went to Düsseldorf to the art school. Gerhard Richter and Benjamin Pike would help to teach the photography class while I studied there. This was at a time when every single student was studying the mediums of video and photography while I was painting, so I was very much influenced by their discussions and at some point I did a lot of video installations and photos. Then I decided to go back to painting and start from scratch.” During a brief stint living in Florence, Katharina was inspired to start utilising architectural space as her canvas.“I got to know a lot about the relationship between painting and architecture because of the fresco painting that is so visible there. That’s how I started to be very intrigued by how a painting could maybe appear in space, other than being on a stretcher. I started to reorganise my whole thinking again about what painting could do. “My works are not frescoes technically speaking, but at the same time the artists of the Renaissance were very aware of the spatial context; they would always see a painting in relationship to something else that was around them.