Through her innovative use of color, Katharina Grosse has changed painting in a fundamental way. Starting with her early works on canvas, she established a new way of making paintings in the 1990s when she began to employ her famous spray technique and opened up entirely new ways to create three-dimensional paintings. To date, she has demonstrated that a wide variety of objects can be used as a medium for paint in numerous large-scale international projects. These range from meter-long fabric panels, polystyrene structures or entire trees and houses through to metal sculptures weighing several tons, such as the one in front of the Kunstmuseum in Bonn. Her great success is largely owed to her ability to convince people that seemingly impossible projects can be realized. Katharina Grosse is not a soft-spoken artist. Her works are huge, loud and garish and show no fear of new twists and turns. They provide the starting point for an almost infinite variety of options for color to take the stage, and constantly probe the boundaries of painting.

In her studios in Berlin and New Zealand, she works on both her major projects as well as her large-format “Studio Paintings”, which are an equally important part of her work, as the artist uses them to experiment with a variety of techniques and materials. Creating, among other things, works in which she attaches branches to the canvas, integrating them into the painting, generating new effects and layers that put the traditional understanding of painting, perspective, foreground and background, composition and pictorial hierarchies to the test.

The fine lines in the present work from 2020 also reveal the use of such auxiliary materials. They run through the layers of bright green and yellow applied with a spray gun like small veins or cracks, indicating the use of branches or strings , in the edges of which the paint gathered during the making, before it was removed from the canvas after drying. The artist has also conceived the work in portrait and landscape format, which represents yet another break with painterly conventions. In the year the work was created, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin showed her highly acclaimed exhibition “It Wasn't Us” and the Kunstkompass ranked Katharina Grosse among the top 100 contemporary artists worldwide. These are indisputable signs of the continuing appreciation of the artist, which, like her painting, seems to know no limits. [AR]