Lot 542 R

Prior to Katharina Grosse leaving the spatial boundaries and the safe area of the canvas in her organic spray painted works towards the end of the 1990s, her works are characteristic of the correspondence of painting within the limitation and nature of the support. The vertical and horizontal orientation of brush strokes of the evenly painted surface, right up to the edges, are determined by the format of the canvas. In these early paintings, the artist concentrates on the material basic conditions of the painting medium and considers her works as overpaintings. The colours arise from an interaction, whose possible dialogue does not ever destroy the unity of the work and fundamentally defines the respective appearance of the colour. The intensification of the colour originates from a rough brush stroke which pertains to the work's essential act of artistic composition like a kind of 'handwriting'. According to Christoph Schreiher, Katharina Grosse's works are thus characterised by an appearance “that seems to absorb all solid and factual picture elements in its radicalism. Thus, Grosse's works do not merely lack all objectivity but also elude linguistic classification as even the colours lose their clarity. Constantly involved in complex interrelation, their individual presence, which due to visual mixes and bold colour combinations loses significance, becomes relative. […] Accordingly, Katharina Grosse's works are less defined as a materially 'tangible' staging of painting but more as scores for sensitive observation, as proposals of perception, to be realised by the viewer.” (Christoph Schreier, in: Frank Günter Zehnder (ed.), Katharina Grosse, exhib.cat. Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, Cologne 1999, p.6).