(born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1961)
Untitled, signed on the reverse Katharina Grosse and dated twice 2002 and 2002/2004, with directional arrow, acrylic on aluminium, 188 x 125 cm (PS)

Provenance:
Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf (whence acquired by the present owner)
Private Collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Katharina Grosse lives and works in Berlin. From 1982 to 1986 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Münster, where she was a student of Norbert Tadeusz and Johannes Brus. Between 1986 and 1990 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts with Gotthard Graubner, who also accepted her as a master student. She completed her studies in 1990. Grosse taught at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee from 2000 to 2010 and is currently a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf.

Katharina Grosse’s paintings have no limits. Since the mid-1980s she has systematically developed the possibilities of abstract painting. After a beginning in the tradition of colour field painting, she moved on to transforming entire spaces and architectures in complex worlds of colour, thus going beyond the barriers that result from dependency on materials. With the same variety that characterises the methods of applying colour – be it with a brush, a role or a spraygun – she also uses different supports, such as canvas, paper, aluminium, floors, façades and heaps of earth. The liberation of painting from classic pictorial supports and the conquest of space are typical features of many of Katharina Grosse’s works.

However, traditional pictorial supports are still part of her oeuvre. Katharina Grosse’s work on aluminium from the year 2002/04 displays an almost impenetrable, multi-layered conglomerate of mixtures that originate from overlapping transparent lines of colour, trails and spray lines, in the same way as colour rivulets are physically compelled to run vertically across the painted surface. Loops, curves, trails, courses and traces not only describe the mutual influences characterising this style of painting, but also develop increasingly complex forms that seem to implode in the picture. The dynamic paint traces interlace in Grosse’s works producing a vortex of colours: visual chromatic inebriation in which colour is left free to expand high-handedly.

Katharina Grosse is listed in the 2015 issue of Kunstkompass, ranking second among the ‘rising talents of the year’.