Katharina Grosse

This is the most comprehensive monograph to date on the innovative abstract site related installations of German artist Katharina Grosse (b.1961). Grosse's daring move from the canvas into both architectural space and the landscape, with her signature colorful spray paintings, has resulted in a deeply compelling body of work. From a Toronto airport to a decrepit beach structure on the New York coast and the spaces of major museums worldwide, Grosse's works present thorough, yet temporary, carnivalesque transformations of extant places and situations. Author Gregory Volk has known Katharina Grosse and written about her work since the very outset of her career and has witnessed her journey from unique talent to radical visionary. As he suggests here, Grosse's continually developing practice, simultaneously ungainly and exhilarating, bewildering and liberating, radically extends the possibilities for contemporary abstract painting.

These essays examine the transformation and expansion of the field of painting in relation to the more general lines of development in culture and visuality. The book is divided into five parts, with each of them pursuing a distinct line of inquiry.

Katharina Grosse's vibrantly colored installation in the Hamburger Bahnhof This publication documents Berlin-based painter Katharina Grosse's (born 1961) installation in the historic hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Grosse's vibrant spraypainted acrylic on walls, ceilings and floors, with sculptural elements, destabilizes museum space.

Large scale colourful airbrush painting on flat and 3 dimensional surfaces. Includes an interview between the artist and curator, Painting on three dimensional supports.

Katharina Grosse's painting practice is a phoenix from the ashes of late Modernism, appending themselves to the Greenbergian cul de sac in an uncanny manner. Since 1998 Grosse has been using a compressed-air spray gun to apply garish swaths and splashes of undulating color directly to gallery walls, floors and ceilings with sublimely spectacular results. Abandoning painting's traditional means of support, however, is simply a step toward getting at the real stakes, which for Grosse is color's liberation from surface. To underscore this point, Grosse began incorporating a range of relief elements into her work - furniture, clothing, solid geometric forms, stones, mounds of earth. Grosse's palette, however, is saturated to the point it threatens one's ability to perceive form and/or space. In her installations, color acts independently of the surfaces to which it is applied. Her work extends painting's modernist logic so that color reified in painting becomes color reified frompainting. Atoms Inside Balloons was Grosse's first foray into spray-painting balloons whose temperamental nature made it a genuine experiment. In addition to the occasional explosion, there was also the slow loss of pressure causing the balloons to sag and even eventually fall to the floor. The more than 100 color photographs in this catalogue document the continually changing balloon installation, and at the same time document the unchanging ability of Grosse's color to override all such qualities as shape and volume. In addition to this wealth of photographs, the book contains essays by Nana Last, Professor of Architecture at Rice University, and David Hilbert, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Last analyzes the unique relationship of architecture and painting in Grosse's practice. Hilbert situates her work within the tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of color.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book by Gertrude Stein, written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas. Alice was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner Gertrude Stein. The book starts with Alice's days in San Francisco, before she moved to France, then describes her moving to Paris, meeting Gertrude, and starting their life together. The book had mixed reception, both among critics and Stein's friends, but the success of it was great. Today it is ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Picasso and Cubism were an important influence on Stein's writing. Her works are compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Katharina Grosse has created a spectacular walk in installation, almost 800 m2 in size, in a hall of the Museum Kunstpalast, using masses of earth, paint and lengths of fabric.This catalogue also documents her most recent paintings. Like the installations, they also take on remarkable dimensions, sometimes up to 36 m2, and break out of the pictorial space by the means of colour expansion.The catalogue was designed in close cooperation with the artist and published to coincide with the exhibition Inside the Speaker at Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, 30 September - 1 February 2014-15.Text in English / Dutch.