A brush with... Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Grosse, who was born in Freiberg im Breisgau, Germany, in 1961, sees painting as an expansive field, which might be explored on canvas, but also directly on gallery walls, on vast textile hangings, on sculptures and natural forms like earth and trees brought into the gallery, as well as in public space and even directly onto the landscape. Using an industrial spray gun, she sees colour as a material, and creates dense swaths of rich hues that form dazzling relationships and absorb and often surround the viewer. Whatever form her work takes, it clearly evokes Katharina’s choreography of gestures as well as representing a response to and creation of architectural space. Seeing painting as a medium that reflects and simultaneously articulates the world, Katharina invites an active response from her viewers, as much bodily as it is visual. She discusses how making her work immediately meets with “feedback” from the surfaces and environments in which she is acting, how she is “at home in flow” when working across multiple pieces, and how she employs colours as a cluster, always in relation to one another. She reflects on the early impact of choreographer Pina Bausch, her residency at Edvard Munch’s former studio at Ekely in Norway, the physicality in the paint of Lovis Corinth, the “razor-sharp sentences” of the writer Annie Ernaux and her fascination with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the inspiring vision and “ecology” of the film-maker Agnes Varda. Plus, she gives insight into life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

Katharina Grosse: Black Bed, MUNCH, Oslo, 26 September-31 December.

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