Katharina Grosse
10 Apr - 14 Jun 2009
Katharina Grosse, shadowbox, 2009
acrylic on laminated rigid foam (partial view)
Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
© Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin / Katharina Grosse
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009
acrylic on laminated rigid foam (partial view)
Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
© Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin / Katharina Grosse
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009
Katharina Grosse
Shadowbox
10 April – 14 June 2009
Katharina Grosse’s work is characterized by an anarchic impulse. Since the beginning of the 1990s, she has been working on a pictorial form that disregards fixed boundaries and hierarchies. For the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Grosse has created a new group of works. The title of the show, “shadowbox”, gives rise to multilayered associations: from shadowboxing, to a kind of negative form of the white cube, all the way to the display.
Four oversized, concave ellipses face each other leaning against the interior walls of the Kunsthalle. The front sides of the heavy picture mediums made of laminated rigid foam are covered with Grosse’s characteristic spray painting. The issue is “to open up a performative space of thought in which everyone can perceive reality in a different way: without notions of good and evil, without hierarchies and borders.” The “shadowbox” is an open system. “Painting, thinking and acting in it means that there is no longer a reality that is more real than potentiality. Reality is thus updated in the possibilities of each individual at all times.” (Katharina Grosse) In this way, the audience is included in an aesthetic event in which qualities of experiencing architecture, sculpture and panel painting merge in one object. Hence, imagination and facts, illusion and abstraction, potentialities and realities cease to form opposite principles. It is precisely their coexistence that lends Grosse’s artistic work relevance within the larger social frame as well. For it offers perception – and cognition – a horizon of experience that goes beyond fixed ideas and unambiguous categories of mental and social stagnation.
Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau) lives in Berlin. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Katja Blomberg (Haus am Waldsee, Berlin).
Shadowbox
10 April – 14 June 2009
Katharina Grosse’s work is characterized by an anarchic impulse. Since the beginning of the 1990s, she has been working on a pictorial form that disregards fixed boundaries and hierarchies. For the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Grosse has created a new group of works. The title of the show, “shadowbox”, gives rise to multilayered associations: from shadowboxing, to a kind of negative form of the white cube, all the way to the display.
Four oversized, concave ellipses face each other leaning against the interior walls of the Kunsthalle. The front sides of the heavy picture mediums made of laminated rigid foam are covered with Grosse’s characteristic spray painting. The issue is “to open up a performative space of thought in which everyone can perceive reality in a different way: without notions of good and evil, without hierarchies and borders.” The “shadowbox” is an open system. “Painting, thinking and acting in it means that there is no longer a reality that is more real than potentiality. Reality is thus updated in the possibilities of each individual at all times.” (Katharina Grosse) In this way, the audience is included in an aesthetic event in which qualities of experiencing architecture, sculpture and panel painting merge in one object. Hence, imagination and facts, illusion and abstraction, potentialities and realities cease to form opposite principles. It is precisely their coexistence that lends Grosse’s artistic work relevance within the larger social frame as well. For it offers perception – and cognition – a horizon of experience that goes beyond fixed ideas and unambiguous categories of mental and social stagnation.
Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau) lives in Berlin. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Katja Blomberg (Haus am Waldsee, Berlin).