Katharina Grosse creates situations that make colour literally tangible. Coming from painting - and seeing herself as a painter - since the 1990s she has expanded her extensive works as powerful forays in colour into the physically experiential realm. As befits her name, she works generously and impetuously, striding through genres, both transforming and upturning spaces.

For years Grosse has been considered amongst the most important artists of her generation internationally speaking. Boundaries in her work are there to be detected, exaggerated and at the same time to be burst. All surfaces are categorically seen as a background for painting, their conditions thus not explored; on the contrary, they are sometimes robbed of their original attribution. Thus she turns floors into paintings, colours into countryside, spaces and functional objects into sculptures, and light she turns into a delineator of spatial existence. In the process she mixes ways of staging with the proceeding between different media, blurs the boundaries of dimensions and turns the creative process into a sort of futuristic laboratory experiment.

Her creative approach knows no boundaries, is spontaneous and excessive without seeming overblown or merely destructive. She thereby places one painting layer over another, revealing in the picture’s conditions the unstoppable will tocreate as a primordial power that can be traced. Over-dimensional and light-intensive colour explosions, based on the condition of movement and superimposition that never wants to end, turn into self-liberation, into an exploration of the transcendent in the pigment, in the painted and unpainted material and its effect in space. In this process Grosse also explores the conditions of the rooms of the art gallery as a performance room; she prises it open and debates the art gallery and its effect as a stage and frame that has been orchestrated by Modernity.

In the Kunsthaus Graz Katharina Grosse studies the meaning of the understated reference and the theatricality of colour. She extends the space of colour to a stage. This becomes something one can experience, walk into, and takes place only when directly lived through. Painting thus becomes an interactive event, linking one to the space around one, linking what one thinks and sees. Questions thereby arise as to the extent to which material and existence can be experienced, as well as concerning the aesthetic direction of light and linearity.