Born in Freiburg in 1961, the artist studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, to which she would return for a professorship from 2010 to 2018. During her studies, Grosse familiarized herself with unconventional methods of painting that incorporate both her body and new tools such as the spray gun and stencils. Her unmistakable canvases that evoke physical and spiritual sensations rather than mere two-dimensional impressions were the astounding result. Katharina Grosse detaches painting from material reality in any form. Her paintings do without composition, they are solely determined by color. "My paintings are prototypes of fantasy," she said at her exhibition at Chi K11 Art Museum in Shanghai in 2020. Her art is meant to be fun, both for her and the viewer. We are not asked to find meaning in it or understand it on any level other than the visual. That's a very generous gift. But it is also a deceptive gift, because in reality, Grosse's works are anything but simple. The processes and methods behind them are complex, and the final products are multi-faceted and multi-layered, both for their physical presence and their contemplative aspects. The 2020 work "Untitled" is at once lush and enigmatically gestural, mimicking an experience of simultaneous presence and absence. The artist is so absorbed in the act of painting that she gets a feeling of a simultaneous being "there and not there". Katharina Grosse interrupts uncompromising color with white patches and unmodulated transitional tones. With its energetic cascades of electric blue, neon yellow, leaf green, and crimson, as well as its eraser-like voids, the present work composes a landscape of intertwined forms that defies any realistic scenery and reveals the painterly process. With this free-flowing dynamic and the gestural color pattern, the artist creates fascinating color worlds that testify to her distinctive aesthetics. The artist saw her breakthrough in Germany in the 1990s; today Grosse has long since made it big around the world. Her works are in major institutions like the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. [SM]