Katharina Grosse began to push the envelope in painting while she was still a student at the art academies in Münster and Düsseldorf, where she studied under Gotthard Graubner, among others. For Grosse, the potential offered by color extends far beyond the rigid, framed canvas. Her early works were rooted in the neo-expressive tendencies of the “Junge Wilde” (Young Wild Ones), but in the mid-1980s she increasingly abandoned figuration. After a phase of intense pigment spray paintings, she turned to more translucent, layered color compositions, applied in broad, sweeping brushstrokes in the early 1990s. Her increasingly radical idea of immersive abstraction led her to use color not only on canvas, but also on walls, objects, and even in public spaces, transforming entire environments into fields of color. A decisive turning point came in 1998, when Grosse discovered the spray gun as her central medium. With this tool, she liberated color from the constraints of the brush and gained a previously unimagined freedom: pigments could be applied from a distance, allowing them to float like mist or clouds of light, while the movements of the eye and body remained closely linked in the creative process.
The masterful use of the spray gun is impressively demonstrated in “Untitled”: drips, splashes, and layered textures challenge traditional notions of the painterly medium, while all traces of the artistic process remain visible, opening up an open field with a dramatic interplay of color, light, darkness, and space. Dark, nuanced tones recede and merge with luminous areas of violet, yellow, green, red, and blue, which rise into lighter areas and form new, dynamic layers. With its monumental dimensions (approx. 220 × 160 cm), the work captivates the viewer and unfolds as a veritable explosion of chromatic depth. The alternation of dense, semi-transparent, and open zones evokes a spatial-temporal experience: not a frozen moment, but an expansion of time in which earlier layers shine through while new ones emerge. The hierarchy of the image remains fluid—both the original movements and those currently emerging can be experienced simultaneously. As Grosse herself notes: "With painting, you can perceive everything on the canvas at the same time. Movements that have been painted first and last are both simultaneously present on the image field. There is no linear or causal hierarchy of activities in a painting. [...] Everything can become anything at any minute." (Katharina Grosse, 2014, Interview Magazine, www.interviewmagazine.com/art/katharina-grosse). [KA]