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Katharina Grosse in "Fiction"
Katharina Grosse creates wildly colorful sculptural environments and paintings that unite the fluid perception of landscape with the ordered hierarchy of painting. Her work is a material record—a story—and, perhaps, an inscription of her thoughts, or an illusion.
Grosse uses boat building techniques to create monumental abstract sculptures for display at Brooklyn’s Metrotech Plaza, while at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, she adds layers of paint to a room filled with soil as a painted sculpture pierces through the building’s architecture. Shown at work in her Berlin studio, Grosse leads viewers through the project I Think This Is a Pine Tree (2013) at the Hamburger Bahnhof.
More information and creditsCredits
Series Created By: Susan Dowling & Susan Sollins. Executive Producer & Curator: Susan Sollins. Series Producer: Eve Moros Ortega. Associate Curator: Wesley Miller. Director of Production: Nick Ravich. Field Producer: Ian Forster. Editor: Mark Sutton. Director of Photography: Jarred Alterman, Claus Deubel, & Gary Henoch. Additional Photography: Linus Andersson, Amanda Björk, Niklas Forssen, Jonathan Näslund, Rafael Salazar, Miguel Sanchez-Martin, Fredrik Streiffert, Mark Walley, & Ava Wiland. Sound: Richard Gin, Agnès Jammal, Oliver Lumpe, Stephan Marshall, Johannes Oscarsson, Angela Walley, & David Williams.
Art Direction & Design: Open, New York. Online Editor: Don Wyllie. Composer: Peter Foley. Voiceover Artist: Jace Alexander, Dale Soules, & Joe Urla. Sound Mix: Cory Melious. Sound Edit: Matt Snedecor. Graphics Animation: CRUX Design. Artwork Animation: Stephanie Andreou. Assistant Editor: Carla Naranjo, Danny Rivera, Leana Siochi, Elizabeth J. Theis, & Bahron Thomas.
Artworks Courtesy of: Omer Fast; Katharina Grosse; Joan Jonas; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; gb agency, Paris; & Johann König, Berlin.
Special Thanks: The Art21 Board of Trustees; Amaral Custom Fabrications; Bildmuseet; Micah Bozeman; Daniel Desure; Forest City Ratner; Framerunner; Hans Grosse; Hamburger Bahnhof; Heard City; Andria Hickey; Kellie Honeycutt; Kulturhuset Stadsteatern; Natalija Martinovic; Jason Moran; Nasher Sculpture Center; NorrlandsOperan; Pat Casteel Transcripts; Public Art Fund; Sam Rauch; Roy Lichtenstein Foundation; Estate of Roy Lichtenstein; Elisa Schroer; Ulrika Sten; & Iris Ströbel.
Additional Art21 Staff: Cristiana Baik, Nicole J. Caruth, KC Forcier, Joe Fusaro, Jessica Hamlin, Jonathan Munar, Alexis Patterson, Heather Reyes, Diane Vivona, & Nechama Winston.
Public Relations: CaraMar Publicity. Station Relations: De Shields Associates, Inc. Legal Counsel: Albert Gottesman.
In Memoriam: Susan Sollins, visionary creator of Art21 and Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Major underwriting for Season 7 of Art in the Twenty-First Century is provided by National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, Agnes Gund, Bloomberg, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, The Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian
Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.
Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.
Katharina Grosse is a painter who often employs electrifying sprayed acrylic colors to create large-scale sculptural environments and smaller wall works. Interested in the shifts of scale between ‘imagining big’ while being small in relationship to one’s surroundings, she explores the dynamic interplay between observing the world and simply being in it. By uniting a fluid perception of landscape with the ordered hierarchy of painting, Grosse treats both architecture and the natural world as an armature for expressive compositions of dreamy abandon, humorous juxtaposition, and futuristic flair.
“It is also very fascinating for me to kind of reset the idea what a painting can be. It’s not like a formal issue only about volume and color.”
Katharina Grosse
In the Studio
Katharina Grosse
Mary Heilmann
Artist at Work
