A muralist and one that works with site-specificity, Katharina Grosse is an artists whose work I can discuss in relation to my own. As my practice has progressed over the last three years, drawing has been something that I have always had at the center of my practice. Looking back, mark making with paint and using colour in my work is something that I have developed a severe interest in.
Grosse is disrupting what it means to be a painter, the work she is doing in immersive where the painting merges with the real world. She balances that boundary between painting and sculpture, bringing the historical ‘painting’ into the three-dimensional world.
Paintings only began to be moved and carried around about 300 years ago, the way that Grosse moves the paint around in the space is contemporary, however not a new idea as discussed in this article by the Gagosian (2020)(https://gagosian.com/media/gallery/press/2020/Brown_Kate._How_Can_a_tnet_August_12_2020.pdf).
Grosse discusses painting directly onto surfaces and how they interact with pigment. I can see this in my work where I have progressed from painting on canvases to corn husks in my sculptural ‘Hare’ (2018) piece in L4. I then progressed to large pieces of paper in L5, working with ink and writing on the walls. In L6, I started working on objects like polystyrene, canvas spread across the floor, the walls in my home and eventually the walls and floors of the studio space at University.
Like Grosse, I believe that painting doesn’t need to be within the strict confines of the traditional canvas, hung on a white gallery wall to be viewed in person and eventually sold within the art market. If I make a painting directly onto a wall or floor, it cannot be owned, or sold, unless the architecture itself is removed or the building is sold. I really like this concept as it makes a work worth more than a price tag or an asset someone can add to their insurance. It is much more personal. It embodies traces of myself, as it sinks into the architecture itself, becoming the surroundings, an immersive space where people walking over the work become the artwork themselves.
Without the audience it is just paint on an architectural surface. The viewer can embody the work, visualising myself working in the space, leaving the ethereal marks on the wall and leaving traces of themselves in the space.
This work was made during lockdown in Germany last year. Grosse, much like myself feels that work can be viewed online and a viewer can gain an insight into the work this way when necessary. I do however feel that a work as grand as this, although documented well, cannot be fully appreciated unless the audience can enter the space. I feel that audience interaction is a huge part of experiencing art.
Images from https://gagosian.com/artists/katharina-grosse/ (2021)
