Lot 39 | Katharina Grosse | Untitled

Clear lines and dynamic color fields
Katharina Grosse is one of the most sought-after artists on the global auction market and has been exhibited by renowned institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and MoMA in New York. She has gained international attention in particular for her site-specific, multi-room installations and her exceptional use of color.
Katharina Grosse understands boundaries as dynamic zones of overlap and transformation. Her works are designed to overcome existing spatial and conceptual limitations, thereby expanding the space of perception. She sees border areas as places of heightened intensity where heterogeneous interests, forms, and meanings collide and can be experienced in simultaneous coexistence. In this simultaneity of contradictions, Grosse recognizes a productive paradox that reveals the ambivalence and complexity of space and perception.
This is also the case in the untitled work from 2009, in which she questions the reception of color as a medium. With the help of clear, powerful contrasts of color and form, color itself becomes an element that describes and depicts space. The background of the composition is characterized by a dynamic diamond pattern that spreads horizontally across the picture surface in multi-layered nuances between beige and magenta. This fixed structure enters into a tense relationship with the organically flowing color field superimposed on it, which covers the geometric pattern in an almost patina-like manner—not as a smooth overpainting, but in a rhizomatic spread reminiscent of growth processes: decentralized, organic, unpredictable. In addition to the formal contrast between stringency and diffuseness, the contrasts between cool and warm colors and between surface and depth also determine the charged visual dynamics of the work.
The earth incorporated at the edges of the organic color field lends the work a haptic quality and expands its compositional effect. At the same time, it adds a touch of urbanity to the work and anchors it in the field of tension between artificiality and naturalness. With the help of this structuring of the picture surface, Grosse succeeds in questioning the classical art-theoretical understanding of color as a surface-bound design element and additionally emphasizes the aspect of the organic. Like Yves Klein in his sponge and pebble reliefs, Katharina Grosse succeeds in shifting the boundaries between color and surface, as well as between painting and sculpture, and in removing them from clear categorization.

Color as a core medium and means of communication
The 2009 work “Untitled” is exemplary of the spatial conception that characterizes Katharina Grosse's oeuvre. In her large-format installations, such as “Untitled Trumpet” at the 56th Venice Biennale or “Mumbling Mud” in Guangzhou, she detaches painting from its classic medium, the canvas, and transfers it into real space (Fig. 1). Color becomes a means of spatial experience that incorporates architectural structures, objects, and materials in equal measure. As in the 2009 work, her installations also reveal a peculiar tension between surface and space, structure and dissolution, order and growth.