Katharina Grosse: Spectrum without Traces

Katharina Grosse paints spaces, often quite literally, as she applies colors to walls, floors, complete houses, and the arrangements of materials she installs in exhibitions. In a series of 15 large-scale studio paintings from 2022/2023, shown at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and presented in this book, her colorful swirls and bundles of twirling paint lines are like excerpts from a larger movement, amplified beyond the artist’s bodily reach by her weapon of choice, the spray gun. “My work has a lot to do with the first initiative of physical impact,” the artist says. “It is the full impact out of the center of the body almost ending in an attack, which I then transform into a colorful event.” The forms repeat and vary and sometimes are interrupted by shadows of branches—in their aesthetic assault the viewer detects many subtleties. The large-format illustrations of the paintings alternate with details and installation shots, replicating both the immediate experience and the conceptual reconfiguration of the painterly gesture in Grosse’s work.