Artist Research- Katharina Grosse
Katharina Grosse is a German artist whose primary focus is colour in and of itself. Her works, according to her, act as an intermediary between the materialised measurable and the imaginative not yet materialised. (materialised measurable being the architecture and the not yet materialised being the paint).
She works on installations or sculptures all of which are covered in a myriad of bright colours arranged in an abstract fashion. The main focus of her work is to not let the architectural space dictate where her paint and how her paint should be applied.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIy9po_ZLKM
I an interview with MOCA (Link above) she says:
“Painting doesn’t follow the three vectorial rules of architectural space- it has a totally different set of rules. So why should it then behave exactly according to those rules?
“Painted space if unfathomable not measurable- it’s imaginative is something that you think”
Her objective then is to take colour and set it as free as possible- which she does with her sculpture, installations and occasionally paintings. Yes, that’s right….. paintings.
But wouldn’t painting a painting defined by an edge and paced on a wall of a space created by that wall, directly violate her “so why should it (paint) then behave exactly according to those (vectorial) rules?” maxim. Yes in my opinion it would, but perhaps I have misunderstood.
However making the paint the primary subject by putting it in places and using it in ways it wouldn’t necessarily be used certainly introduced the viewer to different scenes and sensations. And has given me a lot of different ideas about how I think about using colour.
Such as painting on different gradients, but in a ‘canvas’ type way. I think it would be interseting to see how colour reacts to being placed on this type of surface, to see how colour and space interact togeather.
For this I would make a surface to paint on out of small boards all of which woud be at differnt angles to each other, creatng a surface of mixed gradients on whcih I could paint.
I would also like to see the effect that colour would have on an every day object such as a table or chair and how that would change the way the viewer would see such an object.
These are both just ideas but hopefully at least one will materialise.
