Vivid bands of fluorescent orange, blue and pink, splashes of white, surge across the canvas of Ohne Titel (2015_1043M), creating a complexity of tone and motion. Even though the present work is two-dimensional, it appears multidimensional to the viewer through its various overlapping rays of colours. Void of composition, Katharina Grosse’s painting is solely determined by colours. Contradictions and simultaneities are crucial themes in Katharina Grosse’s oeuvre, in which she makes use of colour as a material. Even though Grosse is essentially a painter, she has been teaching painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 2010 - 2018, she takes an approach to creating works by not making use of a brush or sometimes even a canvas. Instead, since early 2000 Grosse developed a unique technique of predominantly using an industrial spray gun to apply paint. She approaches the practice of painting as an experience and embraces the uncontrollable incidents that arise as she creates a work.

Even though large-scale installations play a central role in Grosse’s extensive oeuvre, she has never completely abandoned painting on canvas. Onto primed canvases, that she staples to the walls of her Berlin Studio, she executes her thoughts through what she herself describes as “blind painting”. Using fabric stencils, that Grosse cut into irregular shapes, she partially covers the canvas which has an initial base of hand-width horizontal brushstrokes. As a next step the surface is further painted or sprayed on in repetitive gestures. The stencils are then removed, and the process is repeated over and over again. Thereby, Grosse manages to create dynamic works such as the present work which vividly embodies countless layers, constant changes of direction and a fierce fight between colours, shapes and markings. In this structure of fragments, blanks and substitutions, it is somewhat intricate to locate the works centre or cohesive composition, and yet these sudden created images do not disintegrate and still form a uniform body with a character of integrity beyond its edges.

Katharina Grosse just recently has had two monumental in situ solo exhibitions at the HAM Helsinki Art Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof. Her works can further be found in the important international collections such as the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to name a few. She has become one of the most important living German female artists and renowned painters of contemporary abstraction as well as a master of monumental painting.