Katharina Grosse: Movement of the Mind
A windy weekend in Marfa welcomed a prolific group of curators, collectors and art enthusiasts who had traveled from all corners of the globe to attend Katharina Grosse’s finissage at the prestigious Galerie Max Hetzler. Located on the rim of the remote Texas town, the gallery was nothing shy of an anomaly in Marfa. Since opening its Texas location in 2022, Max Hetzler has become a beacon in the vast desert. A contemporary space bathed in the region’s raw light, the gallery commands a breathtaking view of the unspoiled West Texas landscape, an ingredient that has led many artists to this distant town.
As the night unfolded, guests, dressed in their favorite boots or black leather jackets, eagerly made their way up the dusty road to celebrate the culmination of Katharina’s eight-month exhibition. Upon arrival, we were greeted by a pink stroke of sunlight ricocheting off the gallery’s metal exterior into a violet night sky. It was a beautiful foretaste of the immersive space of color we were all about to walk into.
We all gathered inside the narrow gallery space where two long tables, draped in white linens and lined with candles, stretched alongside Katharina’s colorful work. I found my place at the end of one of the tables, while the artist sat across from me at the heart of the lively scene. Her black-framed square sunglasses clashed against her frizzy blonde hair as she beamed with the title “artist of the night.”
Her seven large paintings, each a swirl of various colors, overlapping and repeating, extended out from their canvases into the space we all sat in. There was this energy exuding from her works that fascinated me- this strong sense of velocity that beamed out from the gestural strokes and loud colors. Yet within this convergence of movement was also a stillness, a stillness that formed a tension like none other. Within her dynamic paintings, where did this feeling of stillness originate? Was it the stark simplicity of the gallery- a bared boned setting that amplified this feeling? Or was it the vast open landscape of Marfa, quietly stretching out beyond the windows, casting its own tranquil influence? Or perhaps it was something within me- a hum of uncertainty, questioning what I was seeing.
From the very beginning of her career, Katharina has produced loud and boisterous work that demands to be noticed. Whether it is spray painting a house or piling mounds of dirt in a gallery space and coating them with vibrant sprays of color, she creates her extension of the visible- the unseen energy, executed through her movement in response to the environment she is in. Her relationship with Marfa is rooted in this concept.
Katharina’s first visit to Marfa in 1999, as part of the Chinati Artist Residency, marked the creation of one of her most pivotal works, Cheese Gone Bad. In this piece, she transformed the white interior of her studio by spray painting it in bold red and brown strokes with hints of pink and yellow. During the process, she worked with a sense of intuition, barely seeing what she was doing as she sprayed, not in an attempt to create a painting but to interact with the space. However, when locals pointed out the effect of her work at night, it became clear how the colors spilled out from the interior, extending beyond the studio and into the quiet desert nightscape of Marfa forming a painting that transgressed the boundaries of art.
It was with this work, her second year using the spray gun as her primary tool, she discovered the power and profound impact of merging two distinct systems, painting and architecture. It was with this fusion, she began to see that a painting can sit anywhere. Her movement, based on her reaction to the space she was in, gave her 3-D paintings another explorative dimension, possessing narrative qualities. By bringing the elements of color and light with thought itself, Katharina was able to create these worlds within her art- worlds of the unseen, of an energy, and in this case a unique energy found in the stillness of Marfa. Cheese Gone Bad opened up a new conceptual direction for Katharina and ultimately inspired her work for Marfa’s Galerie Max Metzler’s third annual exhibition.
The Super Eight is a series of 7 paintings Katharina painted for Marfa Max Hetzler in her studio in New Zealand. Overlooking the ocean, Katharina revisited her time in Marfa, reminiscing the effect the landscape had upon her- a simple and mundane topography that allows thoughts and ideas to surface and be inspected. With Marfa on her mind, she took to the canvas large and swooping moves of color. Layering those thoughts of the distant town with whatever she was thinking that day in the studio, a multilayered cluster of thoughts illustrated through immediate strokes expanded across the canvas.
These paintings catch your attention full heartedly not only because of their scale but because of their color. When asked about her relationship with color and how methodical she was with her arrangement, Katharina quickly said color placement is not at all part of her strategy. She sees “color as intertwined cables of electricity” and is further energized through her movement. Her movement, revealed through her spray gun, is her driving force.
The quote popularized by Jane Fonda “You think you’re thinking your thoughts. You are not. You are thinking the culture’s thoughts,” comes to mind when I look at Katharina’s paintings. We all experience a sense of tension with our thoughts. Certain thoughts, whether comforting or strange, will randomly appear in our minds based on the environment we find ourselves in. It is that concept, these foreign thoughts, that undoubtedly appear in the withdrawn environment of Marfa, that Katharina is collaborating with and physically expressing into her works.
In closing, Katharina’s work is meant to be experienced, not necessarily understood. By having no physical contact with whatever format she is spraying, she places herself in our seat. She gives power to the mind of the viewer to interpret and to fill the void with whatever is on our minds; the experiences, histories, and thoughts that we all carry.