UTOPIA: Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) works with intensely colourful, large-scale paintings executed directly on the surfaces of architectural spaces. For ARKEN’s UTOPIA project Grosse will develop a new type of installation which will occupy and transform the experience of the museum’s characteristic architecture.

Fact and Imagination Grosse’s installations draw upon a number of heterogeneous references, including renaissance frescoes and murals, abstract painting, psychedelic imagery and graffiti. On several levels, they orchestrate an aesthetic dissolution of boundaries: between architecture and image, painting and its surroundings, the material and the imaginary, fact and imagination. Grosses works aim at opening up gaps in our habitual experience and perceptions. As the artist states:

“The fusion of incompatible systems leads to a confrontation with quite different mental processes than those one is trained for in everyday life, where there is only one answer to a question.”

Imaginary spaces Grosses large installations create a tension between the physical space and the imaginary, pictorial realm suggested by the colourful sprays of paint. As such, they open a utopian space of longing and imagining otherwise. In their coupling of an almost explosive visual dimension and the bodily experience of entering the image, the works create a highly inspiring tension between the real space of our everyday surroundings and an imaginary space of opportunity and fantasies.

UTOPIA:
Katharina Grosse
Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What’s Your Name