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26/4/2005

Katharina Grosse

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Constructions a cru

A gigantic picture

The German artist Katharina Grosse’s latest exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is mutant painting, something between the tag and American abstraction, impressionism and graffiti, wall drawing and easel painting. Grosse combines cultures and practices that are quite removed from one another in time and space. Far from any nostalgia for and fantasies of a “return to painting,” Grosse’s art gives us an idea of what 21st-century painting might be: Without assigned limits, spectacular, technically innovative, her work radiates throughout the space like a gas or fire. With her installation “Constructions à cru,” Grosse transforms the Palais de Tokyo’s volumes into a gigantic picture.

A monumental project

Especially designed for the Palais de Tokyo, “Constructions à cru” is one of Grosse’s most ambitious projects to date. Since the end of the 1990s, the German artist has created large-scale murals inside museums and public spaces like Toronto’s airport in Canada. In 2002, for example, she transformed the outside wall of Birmingham’s Central Library into a gigantic abstract painting.

In the grand tradition of wall painting

To realize these frescoes, Grosse applies acrylic paint directly on the surfaces to be covered, using a spray gun. Through this ionapproach she carries on the tradit of wall painting, from the prehistoric caverns to conceptual painting. She adds a lyric dimension, even a certain violence, to the industrial neutrality of a tool that seems to elude any artistic gesture. Her intervention reveals a new physiognomy of space by underscoring its specificities, and creates a genuine physical experience.

Space taken to task

At the Palais de Tokyo, Grosse has imagined a spectacular installation that contaminates the light-filled space of the great hall. Quantities of colored earth cover the floor and the painting continues on the walls. The building is thus transformed into a total landscape, grabbing viewers, who are nearly engulfed in the painting. Gross incorporates into this space of matter and colors large pictures, formal objects that punctuate the show and lend her composition its particular rhythm.

Without foundations…

The expression “Constructions à cru” (literally raw constructions) signifies “constructed without foundations.” The artist has chosen the title as a way to place this piece on a radical, essential terrain. By playing with the harmony and accidents of color as much as with the use of different materials, Grosse’s installation engenders a genuine tension. Between space and color, the material and the ephemeral, Grosse’s art endlessly reveals painting’s new potential.

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Friburg (Germany). She lives and works in Düsseldorf and Berlin. Since October 2000, she has been a professor at the School of Fine Arts, Berlin-Weissensee.

Exhibition curator
Akiko Miki
assisted by Alexandre Jolly

Image: Katharina Grosse, Palais de Tokyo, avril 2005

Program for Wednesday 27 April:
from 10 a.m. to noon: press visit
from 8 p.m. to midnight: public opening

PALAIS DE TOKYO
Site de création contemporaine
13 avenue du Président Wilson 75116 Paris
Open from noon to midnight, Tuesday through Sunday
Admission: 6 euros/4,50 euros (students less than 26 years old, senior citizens, teachers); free admission for visitors under 18 years of age and the unemployed; free general admission on the first Sunday of each month.

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