Katharina Grosse — Galerie Max Hetzler
The Max Hetzler gallery presents, for the first time in its Parisian space, the work of Katharina Grosse (1961), a major painter in the German art scene. Combining expressiveness, precise concepts and a visceral attachment to sensory experience, the artist strives to reinvent the meaning of painting by giving it a unique dynamism that replaces it within the world.
Katharina Grosse — The Bedroom @ Max Hetzler Gallery from September 8 to October 23, 2023. Learn more Escaping the canvas and frame, breaking free from the brush, the painting invades the space and redefines the boundaries of its deployment, the height of its layers in relation to its distribution with a spray gun. Subjected to a deliberately random order, it acquires its independence from the painter’s gesture. It’s a fascinating paradox, as the use of the spray gun, typically reserved for industry and roadwork, evokes the creation of precision pieces. Here, painting’s function is not to cover a primary object; instead, its covering defines the object itself.
Hence, the strength of this initiatory piece, created in 2004 and brought back into focus by the Max Hetzler gallery, Das Bett, which saw the artist cover her bedroom space with pigments, stripping it of all functionality to freeze it into an object of fiction. From this point unusable, it composed the synthesis of a suspended history, now destined to create symbols. With the fundamental ambition of giving the viewer the means to alter their experience of reality, Katharina Grosse extends the initial escape of this bed. She specifically chose the polyphonic space of the Parisian gallery, adding two displaced areas that extend and complement it. Using the original bed, repainted for the occasion, personal archives and elements gathered during her stay in Paris, the artist locked herself in the gallery for a few days to compose this nocturnal escape full of light.
A mirrored presentation that precisely plays with the duality between the confined spaces and the amplitude of gestures that emphasize the zenithal height of the gallery, left blank. Like a giant scratch in the reduced sphere of the domestic, Grosse applies in the gallery space the principle at work on her canvases of an essential off-sight, of which the exposed part is certainly a crucial knot but carries an existence already escaped from the frame to better join ours.
Rooted in the history of ultramodern art, this partition of the artist’s real intimacy between the memoriabile and the recreation of her interior sees the domestic room become an object of externalization, the original furniture becomes a mobile element to exhibit. A new paradigm that owes as much to the individualization of experiences and narratives as to the desire to lead one’s own life as a work of art. And to lead the audience along in a genuine experience that engages their body, blurring the lines between interiority and exteriority, even between these two notions, attempting, in the emotion of color, to create a continuum between her practice, her existence, the work of art, the place in which it unfolds, and all those who receive it.
Just as in the monumental works she creates in urban territories, in this variation, Katharina Grosse works to disconnect perspectives and perceptions by integrating, in the subtle arrangement of materials, overlapping layers of paint that themselves hide a new complexity. This complexity carries not a symbolic or purely aesthetic message but rather a nearly haptic sensory experience in the intensity of its contrasts and the density of its reflections, overlaying the chimeric strokes of a monumental brush.
Each relief becomes the source of an unexpected detail, a significant protruding line that breaks the uniformization of the covering to reveal harmonic dissonances, orchestral interferences. Thus, within a structure of paint, there is the evocation of both the animal grace of an emancipatory flight and the serene weight of immemorial mountains. And the ultimate goal of her work is to encapsulate the passage of time by imprisoning in uncertainty any readable sign of it. The works bordering the bed are difficult to date, while the smartphone, on the contrary, is datable. The frame of the bed fades under the traces of languid fabrics, evoking classical painting. Eras entwine; only the chronology of the painting is revealed, the blurred succession of pigment integration into the material. Pushing it into the world through action as much as it makes it actually present. And in tune with a time that prevents it from solidifying, she traces in space the escape lines of a present that, even if invisible, continues.
Through painting, therefore, Katharina Grosse explores the possibility of inventing a connection, an emotional contraction that intertwines the different actors of her works and covers differences and distances with a sensitive layer that, without a word, speaks to everyone and talks to all of us.
