BERLIN — Katharina Grosse’s studio arrangement speaks volumes about the manner in which she has recently restructured her practice. Painting takes place in a three-story, custom-designed building in Berlin’s Moabit that — save the stencil-laden canvases tacked around its perimeter — looks more like a high-end auto body shop than studio, thanks to the paint spray guns that hang down from the ceiling. A former bus depot and warehouse for Berlin’s public transport network, the BVG (located a few miles away in Wedding) is now home to her installation practice. Most recently, the studio has been housing a massive sculpture about to be sent off to Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, for exhibition beginning June 1.
While she has been known to throw canvases into the dirt piles of her installations and paint just about anything, Grosse has more lately decided that putting some separation between the two mediums might benefit her work with each. Previously, one easily could have had the (false) impression that canvas-based painting was just a laboratory ground for the artist in creating monumental installations — such as in her 2010 MASS MoCA exhibition, “One Floor Up More Highly.” However, her current show at the Museum De Pont in the Dutch city of Tilburg (on view through June 9), arguably the most prominent showing of her canvases to date, also shows the strength of her paintings when removed from other context.
ARTINFO Germany’s Alexander Forbes visited Grosse to discuss the exhibition, “Two Younger Women Come In And Pull Out A Table,” as well as the ways in which the artist maximizes incoherence and allows her curiosities to guide praxis.
Tell me a little bit about what you have installed at the De Pont.
The museum itself is an old wool factory. It was among the first generation of factory spaces being made into museums. For me, it’s the first time that I will show paintings of such a large scale together: there are 15 in all, that are four-by-eight and three-by-ten meters in size. Before, the installation was much more prominent in the museum exhibitions, or I would incorporate paintings into the installations themselves. The installations are so exciting — they look like they are taking painting to a new place. But, I’m really interested as a painter to be able to work within different formats and contexts, to both compress activity into a small field, onto a canvas, or bring it into a very expansive realm like in the installation work.
The particular installation you’ve created for this exhibition is also a lesser-known component of your three-dimensional practice, in comparison to the polyurethane works. How was it developed?
Throughout the main hall there are 50 or 60 balloons that range in size from two to six meters in width, that I then spray in-situ. The smaller balloons are made out of latex by an Austrian company that uses them to trigger avalanches in the Alps. I’ve used them two or three times before, and they slowly lose air over time and shrivel, which is really great. The larger ones that are spread in between, we had specially manufactured out of PVC. The piece grew out of a show I had at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. The room at the top of the building has this amazing ceiling that is interrupted by this rack of lights that was installed in the 1960s. I found the separation of the space, and especially the massive volume above the lights, to be really fascinating, but of course one of my usual installations couldn’t be placed up there, so I had the idea to use balloons, which could be pumped up while already hung.
In Tilburg they take on a much more direct relationship to the body, however, not being hung so high above; the scale of both the paintings and balloons is almost absurd.
Yeah, it’s so rare that you can show such a large body of extremely large works like these. The idea was to play with dimensions [in such a way] that it almost feels like you have subconsciously zoomed in on the exhibition. With so many works of that massive scale, you stop being able to differentiate so clearly how big or small they actually are. Also, the origin of the works themselves is blurred as well. Some of the paintings have come out of previous installations. They started in relation to a certain sculptural work, came back to the studio, got sprayed over again, and then were put in conversation with another piece, over and over again.
Do you see that as a form of recycling or are they truly different artworks each time?
They’ve been collecting information from different artworks and different sites over time, which I really like. It’s more a game with myself than anything. To the viewer it’s probably not so apparent other than that the compositions are no longer coherent in the way that they might have been in its first installation. But, I’m very interested to see how much incoherence a viewer is able to bear while still being able to make some sense of what is shown.
It’s quite interesting to pull the canvas-based paintings out of an installation content nearly entirely. Has that been mirrored with a shift in your practice as well?
In previous years, I had so many major installations to work on that I had very little time to actually spend in the studio. In the past few years, it’s been really nice to spend more time with the canvas works and develop them more intensely. I always had a hard time working on small paintings, so I forced myself to do it, which allowed me to try out and develop ways of working on canvas much more quickly. In the last two or three months I’ve gone back to the very large pieces but with a better understanding of how I used canvas as opposed to the painting on the installations. Of course, that is a question I’ve been asking throughout my practice, but this time I wanted to be much more clear in ways of differentiating the two things. I let myself be very curious and experimental when both working in the studio and when thinking, which has led me to these much deeper compressions of different layers of paint within single works and changes in how I create the layers as well.
Where has that led you from a formal standpoint?
For the past year, I’ve been working with three-dimensional stencils that are more loosely crumpled onto the canvas, which allow for more irregularity as opposed to the exacting, flat forms from before. I’ve also been looking at how I can use color differently as well or maybe get rid of it entirely. Those paintings wouldn’t be monochrome exactly, but the range of colors I use might change completely; we’ll see.