“Color can appear anywhere,” Katharina Grosse said. “It is independent from any location … Color gets to you like noise, a scent or a taste.”
One of Germany’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Grosse has won international acclaim for exploring and expanding the physical properties, material presence, optical effects and aesthetic potentials of color and paint. In this video, she explores the nature of color, the visceral reactions it prompts and its power to override pictorial relationships and hierarchies.
“Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988-2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions” remains on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, through Jan. 23, 2023. Though the artist is widely known for her ambitious in situ works, this is the first major survey to investigate the important role large-scale canvases have played throughout her decades-long career.
Following its run at the Kemper Art Museum, “Returns, Revisions, Inventions” will travel to Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern in spring 2023, and to Germany’s Kunstmuseum Bonn in spring 2024. A bilingual scholarly volume, co-published with Hatje Cantz, serves both as a record of the exhibition and a reference book on this understudied aspect of Grosse’s remarkable career.
For more information, visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.
