The German painter, who has a studio on the west coast of the North Island, drenched Art Basel in fuschia and white paint this month.
Dressed in full PPE and wielding a lengthy spray gun, artist Katharina Grosse unloaded countless gallons of paint over a plaza outside the world’s pre-eminent
Grosse was invited to create the work, titled CHOIR, for Art Basel’s Messeplatz Project, which last year featured Agnes Denes transforming the plaza into a field of golden wheat. As she so often does, Grosse overflowed the brief, painting way outside the lines to coat building facades, roofs and even the water fountain in paint.
“I don’t even have the feeling that I challenge the boundaries,” Grosse told Viva. “I just don’t see them.”
The Messeplatz project was still in the planning stages when I visited Grosse at her studio on the west coast of the North Island (she prefers to keep its exact location a secret). Six spray guns, the kind contractors use to coat buildings in primer, paint or fire retardant, were attached to paint cans in six different hues. Perhaps a dozen canvases, each roughly 2m tall and already spattered in sweeping arcs of high-pressure pigmentation, were mounted on the walls of a space the size of a squash court.
“I have a scaffolding coming,” Grosse warned me, smiling in paint-splashed pants and a lime green T-shirt, when I arrived. “I want to be able to get up higher.”
Going higher, wider and bigger is core to Grosse’s practice, which stretches from Germany all the way to Aotearoa New Zealand, where she has had a home studio since 2019. Designed by Māori architect Rewi Thompson, the building is one long curve following the contour line of the hill, which is dense with native bush, including mānuka, toe toe, nīkau and cabbage trees. As well as indoor and outdoor spaces for painting, it includes a living space with a slit window that displays the horizon – a narrow rectangle of sea and sky – but otherwise blocks out sun so powerful she prefers to call it “radiation”. It’s an enviable set-up and yet for Grosse, it’s decidedly modest.
In Europe, Grosse works with a team of five employees and up to 15 freelancers as she ramps up to big shows. She has a purpose-built, three-storey home studio in Berlin, and in Groß Kreutz, an hour’s drive from the city, she has taken over a former German Democratic Republic-era (ie East German) agricultural co-operative, where she’s renovating the numerous industrial barns and buildings.
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Advertise with NZME.Her artworks can be correspondingly massive. In 2018, she painted 8000sq m of fabric – hung by a master rigger who’d worked on sailboats – at Carriageworks, Sydney. I first saw a major exhibition of her work in Shanghai a year later where she sprayed colour over all kinds of materials, including great glaciers of sculpted polystyrene, piles of dirt, ventilation tubes, and more fabric in the basement gallery of a shopping mall. Grosse’s works can be awe-inspiring but they can also make you feel giddy, like a kid intuiting that some rule has been broken.
She quotes a phrase from Chinese philosophy that gets at the feeling: “a large painting has no size”. The work is no longer contained by the world; it is one.
Grosse grew up in Freiburg, in the south of Germany, just across the border from Basel. Painting outdoors as a kid, she recalls an instructor suggesting she add a tree to her composition that was behind her, not in her field of view. “You can do that?” she marvelled.
She studied at the Kunstakademie Münster from 1982 to 1986, and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1986 to 1990, where she learnt from artists including Nam Jun Paik and curator Kasper König, who founded Skulptur Projekte Münster, which paved the way for today’s most ambitious public sculpture projects and art parks.
On her first visit to Paris, when she was around 19 years old, she returned with a couple of Monet postcards and a little catalogue on American land artist Robert Smithson, who really interested her at the time. In 1969, Smithson poured a truckload of hot asphalt down a steep bank in an Italian quarry, a work that recalls both Grosse’s painted dirt piles and a quirk of the Messeplatz Project: prior to painting, the whole plaza had to be covered in a very thin layer of asphalt to protect the surface beneath.
Grosse feels an affinity with Smithson’s desire to break free of the institution and create works that can’t easily be owned, but deviates, she says, “because I still think I make a painting”. Her practice might seem to derive from abstract expressionist or gestural painters like Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, but she differs in that, “I don’t think that I am the centre of the authorship”. Ultimately, she’s not that interested in art world categorisations and delineations.
“Birds are not interested in bird history because they are birds,” she says, paraphrasing American painter Barnett Newman. “I’m a painter, not an art historian.”
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Advertise with NZME.Grosse first picked up an airbrush during a residency in Marseille. She disliked having to wear a mask, and the noise of the air compressor, but says, “I liked the way that the spray was sitting on the surface of the paper.” She found a kind of immediacy in being able to throw paint on to anything, without obscuring her view the way you do when you introduce a brush to a canvas. As her works grew in size, she transitioned from airbrushes to spray guns.
“If you have a spray gun, you move much faster,” she says. “You can’t just go and do that one thing, because there’s so much paint coming out. Your thinking gets accelerated. There’s a compression being generated by the gun, because the gun is compressing the paint through the nozzle, and that makes you also part of that process, of that compression.”
Working fast at scale means using her whole body. Grosse takes inspiration from footballers and their intuitive knowledge of what’s happening around them.
“When I paint a very large outdoor painting, I actually memorise the whole field by walking it, setting it in my mind. I can trust that the computer up here is working really well. You have that spatial awareness that’s actually integrating instinctively.”
Grosse came to New Zealand in 2001 as an artist-in-residence at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. It was then that she met another of the world’s best living painters, Judy Millar, now her partner, whose studio is just a stone’s throw from Grosse’s.
Like Grosse, Millar is an abstract painter, but instead of colour sneezing or settling like dust over surfaces, it oozes and smears. Both artists make remarkable use of colour, with one major difference: Millar uses black to dramatic effect.
“I’ve always detested black, since day one,” Grosse says. “I’m afraid of it. It’s very rare I have something black that I wear. It doesn’t vibrate for me.”
In New Zealand, though, the German artist finds black to be very natural and interesting, including the way it inhabits the negative space of Māori carvings.
“I think Judy cannot help but see black because the light here is so strong and so defining. The shadows by contrast are brilliant blacks.”
Ours are not the mauve and ultramarine shadows of European impressionists.
Having a painter as a partner has its benefits, Grosse says.
“We do talk a lot about work in general. When we’re interested in something, we really go there and get into it. That’s really great, because we have very different backgrounds, but we have a very special interest in exploring and changing that.”
Millar is more than just a sounding board; she’s “somebody who I can trust fully, of course. Somebody who would tell you something you didn’t want to hear.”
In Europe, where she might manage a team of 20, Grosse has to balance two completely different thought processes, something she likens to a director acting in her own films.
Her time in New Zealand is different, she says.
“I completely rebuild my interior system. I can see myself far more clearly: what I think, how my thoughts are sometimes out of balance, how I’m getting more focused, how I actually have interior preferences that I’ve never thought about.”
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