Until the end of the month of June 2023, the Kunstmuseum Bern present the incredible studio paintings of the German born artist Katharina Grosse. Titled "Katharina Grosse - Studio Paintings - 1988 - 2022" the show present for the first time Grosse's studio work, made over a period of 40 years.
Since the 90s, the artist has developed a new way of expressing her art, not by using classical elements such as oil paint, brush and canvas, but by applying paint with a spray gun. With this new approach, sometimes made with quite a large and impressive format the artist goes beyond the traditional approach of painting, it's a performance in itself to paint and to experiment the work.
In her work, there is not hierarchy. She didn't make a big painting to be important, she doesn't create small work to be lesser-know, she doesn't create a background and a foregoing to create a dynamic or a "story" in the picture, she just put color onto a surface.
This large exhibition defined this practice with 43 paintings from all phases of her work, in addition, the museum installed three new room-sized photographic prints on fabric in the atrium of the exhibition.
The WOMEN
2. Katharina Grosse, 2022 - Photo: © Aman Shakya
/SCAD Savannah College of Art and Design
The artist Katharina Grosse is born on 2nd October 1961 in Freiburg, Germany. After her study in Bochum, Grosse studied at the art academies in Münster and in Düsseldorf with Norbert Tadeusz and Gotthard Graubner. After her studies, she was a teacher at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee (2000-2010) and professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010-2018).
Now the artist lives and work between Berlin and New Zealand.
Her work can be found in numerous private and public art collections such as the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, UBS AG Collection, Munich/Zurich, etc.
The layout of the exhibition and the definition of the practice of Katharina Grosse
The exhibition presented in Bern is organised into two sections, and each of the themes have a thematic focus. On the first floor you will find paintings around the theme of "Returns, Revisions, Inventions" which comprise of paintings executed since the 80s. For 40 years the artist has developed a practice centred around colours, shapes and paints in which some motifs are coming back, such as the circles, the lines, the squares and the fluorescent paints.
The second section which occupy the ground-floor questions the notion and definition of painting. When you look on the internet the definition of painting, it's defines as "a picture made using paint". But Grosse shaped shifted this definition, of course she uses quite traditional materials such as linen or a frame for the canvas, but over the decades of her work she transforms the painting into an autonomous object, sometime free flowing onto the frame, sometime without a frame or with a branch or a tree.
This new principle involves the creation of new techniques such as stencil, cutting tools, frames and structural components which supports the whole. But by using materials such as earth and tree branches, collages and slashes of canvases, they emphasise the fragmentation and disorientation of the painting and the viewer rather than creating a unified work.
The two chapters of the exhibition are linked by an installation in the foyer, which present enlarge photographs from the painting process of the artist onto artificial silk.
All in all, the exhibition also encompasses the beginning of the career of the artist. At first, when she was at the art academies in Münster and in Düsseldorf with Norbert Tadeusz and Gotthard Graubner she starts using paint (oil paint or acrylic paint) to create her work. For her, digital medium or even photography didn't gave the feeling she wanted, the liberty to do whatever she feels like, the feeling and the presence of a real object in the moment of its creation, rather then philography which you need to develop, print or edit, or sculpture.
Painting will be her medium for the rest of her life because it's a direct translation of your movement, it doesn't require a technical learning or a process after the picture is over. It's also the continuity of centuries of tradition with colours, with paints, creating artworks (small or big) and that's how people first started creating during the Renaissance, and even earlier when you think about the fresco in Lascaux.
"I thought it was the most tactile, visceral, and essential, and I wanted to work in an area that doesn’t use language or pho- tography. I wanted to work in an area where something exists before you start to think in language. That’s how I discovered that colour is also so vital for me."
She also thinks that our generation, in which scrolling on social media and screens should be provided with tactile work, sometime big in scale to immerse the viewer into a field of new colors and shapes, a different kind of knowledge, maybe one that is even more authentic.
Speaking of experience, the choice of colours plays an important role. Of course it's important to choose the palette and the colours you wanted, but it's also important that the color resonate within you, because when you look at a work of art, or even around yourself, colour engage a dialogue between your eyes, your perceptions and your reactions, your moods and your emotions.
Thus, the colours of Grosse is defined not only by how she applies it but also by her saturation and her artificiality, most of them coming from the paint can coming from the producer rather then mixing the paint, to paint the "perfect" shade of blue, red, yellow or pink.
Over the years, she restricts her palette to three yellows, three reds, three greens, three blues, and a couple of in betweens – mostly to shift between cold and warm, opaque and translucent – and white, it's basically the "Grosse palette". All in all the colours she used are all artificial, which have no linked to the space we are surrounded, it's not the colours you will find naturally in flowers, trees, cities or even public spaces.
Speaking of colours and spaces, Katharina Grosse created her first wall works painted with the spray gun technique in 1998 in Sydney as a contribution to the 11th Biennale of Sydney, at the time it was groundbreaking. The same year, the artist came to the Kunsthalle of Bern (basically the center of contemporary art of Bern) to create another mural. Now the artist is back in Switzerland to showcase another side of her work, an "unknown" and quite confidential part of her studio practice.
The exhibition catalogue and the program
4. Photo: © Rolf Siegenthaler / Kunstmuseum Bern
The exhibition is accompanied by a varied program of activities, conferences and visits but also by a beautiful and quite large exhibition catalogue titled "Katharina Grosse - Studio Paintings - 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions" published by Hatje Cantz Verlarg.
The catalogue includes text and essays by Graham Bader, Stephan Berg, Kathleen Bühler, Sabine Eckmann, Gregory H. Williams and it's edited by Sabine Eckmann.
ISBN : 978-3-7757-5338-8 / Price : CHF 45
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Bern
Date: 3.3.2023 – 25.6.2023
Curators: Kathleen Bühler
Ticket: Available online OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Bern
Holderstrasse 12
CH-3011 Bern
Phone: +41 31 328 09 44
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbern.ch