Katharina Grosse at Kunstmuseum Bern

Katharina Grosse at Kunstmuseum Bern

Between 3 March and 25 June 2023, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing a major exhibition devoted to Katharina Grosse. It is the first exhibition in Switzerland to focus on Grosse’s studio works. The large-format, vibrantly colored paintings from the 1980s until the present clearly show the importance of the works on canvas in the German artist’s oeuvre as a whole.

Since the 1990s, Katharina Grosse has developed a body of work marked by an interest in performativity and mediality. Of central importance to Grosse’s practice is color: she experiments with its physical presence and its sensory and socio-political potential. Grosse uses paint to break down conventional relationships between foreground, background, and underground – both on the canvas and beyond it.

Studio works as a new perspective

Katharina Grosse began working on her first studio works while studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1986 and 1990. Based on these works, the German artist achieved a breakthrough in the 1990s. With the three large-format photographic prints on fabric, the exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bern 25 years later shows yet again a site-related installation by Katharina Grosse and sheds new light on the artist’s work, always moving along the boundaries of current ideas of painting, from the viewpoint of her studio works.

Returns, revisions, inventions

Like Grosse’s artistic process, the exhibition is divided into two thematic chapters. In the first chapter, Returns, Revisions, Inventions, the artistic process is laid bare in all its revisions and new inventions. The juxtaposition of paintings from different decades reveals the ways in which Katharina Grosse returns to previous moments in her own oeuvre and develops them further with new inventions. Colors and forms, materials and working methods appear, then reappear transformed.

The second chapter, Fissures and Ruptures, expands on this approach and highlights the various methods Grosse uses to break up the homogenous surface of the image in order to question its autonomy and connect it to the spaces of the everyday.

Colour play for the senses

The element of color is of central importance in the interplay of references and ruptures in Grosse’s painting. The artist assigns an immediate resonance to color, which hits the viewer before one has fully grasped it. The pure, strong colors that Grosse uses reveal their full effect in the large-format paintings, plunging viewers into a sensual play of colors.

With constantly new variations and unfamiliar minglings of foreground, background, and surrounding space, the works invite the viewer to discover diversity and adopt different perspectives – an approach that reflects not only sensory but in many respects socio-political potential.

About Katharina Grosse

Born in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany) in 1961, Katharina Grosse has held professorships at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand.