Katharina Grosse Just Two of Us

For the past two decades, Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Germany) has pushed the limits of painting, expanding the traditional notion of the canvas in both form and content. Interested in the spatial dimension of paint, Grosse wields a spray gun rather than a paintbrush, creating abstract and illusionistic layers of color and texture on unconventional surfaces. Grosse’s painting has transformed objects and environments as familiar and unexpected as building facades, piles of earth, domestic spaces, and abstract forms.

For Just Two of Us, Grosse has placed 18 large, irregularly shaped sculptures in two separate clusters between the trees of the plaza. Like cosmic siblings, these craggy peaks call to mind unearthly forms: a jagged Technicolor quarry or piles of meteor debris. In contrast to their monumental scale and brutal shape, the ridges and valleys of each object create a delicate interplay of depth, movement and light. Veiled with Grosse’s diaphanous paint, they erupt in color as the boundaries of each plane are obliterated, transforming the plaza into an otherworldly landscape of vivid hues and undulating forms.

Katharina Grosse: Just Two of Us is curated by Andria Hickey.