(born in Freiburg in Breisgau in 1961)
Untitled, 2000, on the stretcher dated, numbered 2000/ 1049L, oil on canvas, 250 x 200 cm, framed

The work is listed in the artist’s archive as KG/M 2000/ 1049L.
We are grateful to the Studio Katharina Grosse for the kind assistance.

Provenance:
Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich - acquired there by the present owner Private Collection, Germany

Katharina Grosse’s works draw their impact from their aesthetics and the sensuality of the various colours layered on top of each other; the dialogue between them, within the image, is sometimes finely tuned, and sometimes seems to clash. The strictly geometric, large-scale paintings of the late 1990s are brought to life thanks to the interplay between the impact of their colours on the surface of the image and their exceptional aura that radiates into the surrounding space. Various work stages see layer of colour placed atop upon layer of colour on the image medium (generally performed with a spraygun from 1998 onwards), and scraped off in vertical and horizontal movements so that the intensity of the colour underneath can be seen, like a piece of tracing paper. Katharina Grosse uses this method to give her works a striking and rationally comprehensible identity that is wholly their own. Her works revolve around this: the unity of the work is never challenged by the dialogue between the colours. Despite this, the works have a geometric appearance, meaning that it is also possible to discern coherence in terms of form, which is characteristic of her artwork around the Millennium. Katharina Grosse’s presence in her works is articulated “in a quite different way, in fact as a mixture of gestural dynamics and formal discipline. The clearly visible brushstrokes are unambiguously related to the vertical axis of the painter’s body. This up and down determines the structure, and the free brushstroke results in slight deviations to the right and left, giving the impression of a veil of colour gently stirring in the wind. […]
To the extent that I have a complete impression of her oeuvre, she usually crosses one structure with another, operates with different colour fields and in this way marks out large ordered contexts that take the idea of an Allover ad absurdum. […]
And besides the up and down of her movements does not extend beyond the edges of the canvas. At the upper edge in particular the break in the movement of the paintbrush is often easy to make out from the round arching effect at these points. This is less clear at the lower edge, which may be linked with the fact that the paintbrush detaches itself more easily from the painted surface in the downward movement and then starts again with the upward movement. But at the sides such relations of the working process to the boundaries of the image can scarcely be verified. […]
Painting is a three-dimensional event for Katharina Grosse, regardless of her chosen support for her paint, and of the application ritual.”
(Armin Zweite, Farbe, Form, Format. 12 Stichworte zu Katharina Grosse, in: Katharina Grosse, Nuremberg 1998, p. 58 f)

“Colour is effective and silent”
Katharina Grosse