Katharina Grosse - Untitled - image-1

Lot 540 D

Katharina Grosse - Untitled

Auction 1122 - overview Cologne
01.12.2018, 14:00 - Contemporary Art I
Estimate: 30.000 € - 40.000 €
Result: 42.160 € (incl. premium)

Katharina Grosse

Untitled
1999

Acrylic on aluminium. 125 x 94 cm. Signed and dated 'Katharina Grosse 1999' verso and with directional arrow. - Minor traces of age.

There is such a thing as an early work. A 'panel painting' such as this one, which was created prior to the artist's orgiastic, colour-spraying, large-scale 'all-over' paintings. This work is not oversized to the extent that canvases with the corresponding stretcher frames no longer suffice, which is why entire rooms, facades, entire streets and landscapes are being painted over with spray paints by Katharina Grosse. She exceeds any imaginable idea of format and conceivable dimensions and thus develops her greatest possible colour potential.
And yet Katharina Grosse, as here, has applied the paint with the brush line-by-line, physically comprehensible with distinguishable, rhythmically juxtaposed brush strokes, not opaque, but varnished, leaving the smooth, non-absorbent aluminium panel visible. In this way, the haptic materiality of the support and the vertical and above it horizontal, somewhat lighter and varnished colour is intensely comprehensible. Katharina Grosse paints an almost monochrome, optically two-part picture that refers to the essential virtues of classical painting: the practice of the painterly application. In the 'small' format, created in 1999, one can also feel a contemplative reflection, a concentration on the essential: the process of painting. Shortly before the beginning of the new millennium, the artist is on the threshold of drastically and expansively shifting the perception of her painting boundaries, replacing the application of paint with a brush with the spraying of colours. “Spraying allows access,” says the artist in 2004, “which comes directly from seeing, while the painting of lines with a brush emerges primarily from body movement. The movement with the eye is much more connected with the movement of the spray gun. One deviates from the scale determined by the body.” (Katharina Grosse in conversation with Lothar Frangenberg, quoted from Ulrich Loock, in: exhib.cat.: Katarina Grosse, Inside the Speaker, Dusseldorf 2014, p.87). It appears that for Katharina Grosse, the oversized format, the allover, can thus no longer be realised using conventional painting techniques; seen in this light, this aluminium panel with the vertical and horizontal brush application is a very private, if not to say intimate, work by the artist.

Certificate

The present work is registered in the artist's archive. We would like to thank Studio Katharina Grosse, Berlin, for helpful information.

Provenance

Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorf; private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia