Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us

until 10 January, 2021

A special exhibition of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin

by Elda Oreto

Katharina Grosse turns the world into a canvas and everything into a work of art, the exhibition “Katharina Grosse: It Wasn’t Us”, curated by Udo Kittelmann and Gabriele Knapstein, at Hamburger Bahnhof, until January 10, 2021, was prepared over the course of two years, thanks to the support of the Freunde der Nationalgalerie and Volkswagen, and it is literally a huge site specific painting, the greatest work of its kind ever made by the artist in Europe, which extends seamlessly through the museum’s interior and exterior space.

Entering the large hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the visitor is overwhelmed by a polychrome seawave that invades the architecture, from the entrance to the rear exit, rising from the floor and above a series of enormous polystyrene and bronze shapes, iridescent icebergs, until it comes out of the museum space and spreads into the backyard. And going even further, it reaches into the urban space up to the palaces and buildings.

To realize the massive exhibition is the result of an extreme complex process. Grosse transposed the sculptural elements to their final dimension through a multi-step production, involving incremental scale changes. The polystyrene and bronze objects were created using digital technologies; each shape, each element has been finished by hand before being processed into data through a 3D scanning system and enlarged several times.

The constituent parts of the unpainted sculptures, which Grosse calls ‘the Ghost’, have been moved to the museum hall and assembled by a specialized team. For several days, during the first lock down, the artist worked on the Ghost, covering it together with the floor of the building with dynamic stripes of color applied in layers with a spray gun. In this painting process, typical of Grosse’s creative intervention, the colors react differently depending on the surfaces they encounter and the density of the paint.

While inside the Hamburger Bahnhof the artist plays with the architectural elements and the lighting conditions, outside, in the external sections, she interacts with the trees and the vegetation, the weather conditions and the daily life of the square. Elements such as lampposts and stone curbs in Grosse’s image are also reactivated. 

The setting in itself is a place in transformation, framed by the neighboring buildings of the so-called ‘Europacity’, whose expansion will soon replace the Rieckhallen, it is currently used by the museum to house the collections. For the exhibition, Hatje Cantz Verlag created a beautiful catalog which presents the explosive value of the exhibition in an extremely effective way.

Katharina Grosse (* 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau) is one of the most important painters on the international contemporary art scene. She studied at the Kunstakademie Münster and at the Düsseldorf Academy, where she was also a lecturer from 2010 to 2018. Her works have been exhibited in several museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2019), the National Gallery in Prague (2018 ), the chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018) and MoMA PS1 in New York (2016) and several biennial and triennial, including Aarhus (2017), Venice (2015), and Curitiba (2013). Precedents of her large-scale site-specific interventions in public space include “psychylustro”, created as part of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (2014); “Rocka-way”, produced for MoMA PS1-Programm “Rockaway!” in Fort Tilden, New York (2016); and “Asphalt Air and Hair” at the ARoS Triennale, Aar-hus (2017). 

In her practice, paint pops up where the gaze flows. It doesn’t matter on which kind of surface. The gaze slides from one object to another rapidly and so does the painting in space. Without restrictions. Stripping off the painting from the canvas Grosse turns it in a vital entity that goes beyond traditional parameters and throws itself into the surrounding space. The painting does not remain attached to the canvas, but it is transformed into a fluid medium that is in motion.

This invasion of the space by the painting, that follows the horizons of vision, becomes a game of projections that Grosse manifests through the use of the spray gun. The spray gun allows her to graft a pure color into a pre-existing color. It is a violent gesture. Yet this aggression is not a reaction against something specific but it is a transformative force. It is a way to propose a change without destruction or cancellation. A total reversal of perspective.

Where the eye goes, attention also follows. The places on which Katharina Grosse works are already on the verge of changing and it is exactly at this point that the artist intervenes. The transformation is also seen as an acceleration: a manifestation of the impermanence of life. In this inevitable and unstoppable flow of all things, peripheral vision takes on a special value  in Katharina Grosse’s works, and more so on those traditionally conceived on canvas or on smaller surfaces, placing the work in a necessary relationship with the context. Nothing really becomes indifferent, everything counts and it is part of the work.

The paintings on canvas are containers in which the paint is crowded on the surface, stratifying. The artist’s intention is to imagine the painting in all its possibilities which can have an active impact on our daily life, intensifying it, and showing alternative ways of thinking. In “It wasn’t us”, Katharina Grosse almost seems to question herself, the role and the future of museums and cultural institutions as political and social agents. This is a sensitive argument especially in these days that, due to the pandemic, sees all the institutional structures forced to acquire another form. The subversive and violent gesture of painting stretches beyond institutional borders into the public space in a movement that calls into question the usual perspectives and points of view.