Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Katharina Grosse at Christopher Grimes

Katharina Grosse at Christopher Grimes
Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Susan Emerling

In this terrific show, Berlin-based Katharina Grosse trafficked in brilliantly hued, renegade, freeform abstraction, using an industrial spray gun to apply acrylic paint directly to the white walls and gray concrete floor of the gallery. On the back wall, a shock of emerald green dazzled over cyan and yellow. Color dripped down the wall and laid out a carpet of green and blue at the viewer's feet. One entered by walking directly onto the painting. Energetic dashes of magenta screamed along a side wall and disappeared into the distance, visually unfolding the architecture, so that the perpendicular walls and floor became one extended and disorienting plane of dynamic color. A skylight overhead set the colors ablaze with natural light.

At first it all looked so simple, then Grosse smartly complicated her endeavor, rudely interrupting the swoops of turquoise and purple on the side wall with a large rectangular expanse of untouched white--the silhouette of a barrier that was propped against the wall during the painting process. Inserted into the void was a smaller (70 by 118 inches) white canvas, on which Grosse used a thick brush to paint kinetic pinwheels of translucent color. The white background functioned like a witty surrogate for the gallery wall, and the brush reintroduced the intimacy of human touch that had been obliterated by the mechanized spray gun.

Opposite was a large, densely spray-painted canvas that solved the mystery of the void on the facing wall. This luminescent, multicolored painting features a glimmering horizon of yellow and pale metallic gold dripping with the wet overspray of aqua, green, purple and red. Though the gestures and colors matched the outline on the facing wall--turquoise bands and purple diagonals--everything functions differently on stretched canvas. The opaque colors all but obliterate the white background, giving it a sense of solidity and objecthood that is absent in the wall painting, and constrain what had been so expansively and spatially transgressive into something pictorially taut and composed.

In the rear gallery, Grosse vandalized a small, itinerant domestic scene--a pair of black futons strewn with clothes and books stacked on the floor--with dense squirts of magenta and lime paint streaking diagonally across the dreary tableau and exploding in an exuberant blue splash in the comer. Unlike Jessica Stockholder, whose colorful installations are grounded in sculpture, Grosse stays within the realm of painting, rendering the diverse materials as support, unifying their discrete entities under the paint. Drawing equally from Abstract Expressionism, mural painting and graffiti art, Grosse enthusiastically embraces the performative aspects of painting.

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