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Widely known for her in situ paintings, in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, Katharina Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a spray gun, distancing the artistic act from the hand, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark.
Grosse’s investigation of the restlessness between the projected and real spaces of painting has also been accomplished on her canvases. In this more classical form, the tension between what we see and what we imagine is negotiated with a stricter adherence to the two-dimensional support as backdrop for Grosse’s choreography of the endless dance between fact and figment. Surface is thus both a material ground and a screen for projection, and in layering, the supposedly stable base of painting can become a virtual house of cards, where we cannot be sure what is on top of what, where things begin and where they end. In Grosse’s Untitled edition, this to and fro is achieved with an intelligence that can only be described as visual. Produced via myriad color inversions, Grosse’s Ditone print reorganizes the entire matrix of her work to assert the permanent play of layered surfaces, both real and imagined.
