2023-04-29 11:01:39
MWith precise movements, Katharina Grosse cuts open a tree cake and places the rings, which resemble an architectural model, on a plate. There is also strong coffee. It is 9.30 a.m., we are standing in a GDR supermarket in Friedrichshain that has been converted into a residential building. Consumption was the official term at the time, “food cubes” the unofficial one. Grosse praises the building, which she bought in 2005 and carefully renovated a few years later, as “great, spacious architecture”.
It’s cool outside, but Grosse has put the plants outside anyway. She rejected the idea of an opaque wall, she says, so as not to lock herself in. Now complete strangers sometimes talk to her through the fence or ask for surplus quinces. An urban idyll, next to which the tram rushes by every ten minutes.
Katharina Grosse is one of the most famous contemporary artists. She is famous for creating painterly environments, some of them huge, using paint shot from a pressure gun. The daughter of an artist and a German professor, who was born in Freiburg in 1961 and grew up in Bochum, covered a military ruin in the Rockaways near New York in wild red and transformed Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof art museum into an angular, garish landscape. She studied in Münster and then at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with the painter Gotthard Graubner.
The late 1980s were a time of intensive self-examination in painting, which in terms of its relevance faced increasing competition from installation and media art. At the 1998 Sydney Biennale, Grosse sprayed paint directly onto architectural structures for the first time. Even canvases up to ten meters wide represent only excerpts of a larger continuum, because her actual theme is color itself, its power, which has long been underestimated.
“I would like to paint as if I were alone,” she says in the car, “like with watercolors, but in really big dimensions.” At home she has set up a watercolor studio. Anything bigger has to be created somewhere else – in her studio in Moabit or outside the city, where there is much more space. Much more. We drive a good hour out of Berlin to Groß Kreutz an der Havel in southwestern Brandenburg. Grosse set up a charitable foundation in 2020 on a six-hectare former LPG site and called it Wunderblock.
She wants to expand the understanding of painting: Katharina Grosse
Which: © Gordon Welters
The conversion of the site, which has hardly been used for decades, into studios and living quarters for artists and scholarship holders is a mammoth project. In two weeks she wants to start painting again here, hopefully it will be warm enough then, because you can’t heat the halls. The studio is as big as a factory hall and is laid out with used wood. A new window opening was hemmed into the wrong place in the concrete, the frame is lying around wrapped up, all the screens are covered with foil to keep out the dust.
As we wander from house to house, we meet the workshop manager. No, he reports, deer were no longer seen on the property, the new fence keeps them away, but not sparrows, martens, rats and the two barn owls.
No private pleasure
There is still work to be done. The former engine workshop of the LPG is at least largely renovated. You could also spend the night here, the house is on the street and is connected to all networks, which still has to be done for the others. Kilometers of power cables and water pipes have to be laid, not to mention heat pumps and solar systems.
Vastness is the impression that Groß Kreutz leaves behind, the sky arches like a dome over the flat land, while far away you can see deer jumping over the fields. The animals are surprisingly large up close, says the artist. Even from afar, they appear self-confident, as if they are the real owners of the country and not Ms. Grosse from Berlin.
But what is happening here should not be a private pleasure. The Wunderblock Foundation has set itself the goal of “broadening and deepening our understanding of painting” – as can be read on the homepage; it also awards grants and prizes. The first Wunderblock Award in 2022 went to Sam Zamrik, a young Syrian poet who writes in German and English and has just released his debut with Hanser.
Katharina Grosse is looking forward to the summer. More people would then find their way here to this quiet but not isolated area near Potsdam. Once again she praises the functional architecture of the GDR. Only one roof had to be removed, within the remaining walls a garden is to be created on the sandy soil, which would then need irrigation, and water is becoming increasingly scarce in the area. Katharina Grosse is not yet sure how to deal with it. She is in contact with Piet Oudolf, the well-known garden designer who also planted the High Line in New York. And Oudolf says there can be no garden without watering.
We leave at around 1 p.m., drive through the commuter belt back to Berlin, to the headquarters. In 2008, Grosse had Augustin and Frank Architects build a studio building for him on Lehrter Strasse in Moabit, with large windows distributed irregularly across the concrete facade, through which the people at the bus stop outside look like extras in an Ultra HD film. Her team works in this house and in rented rooms next door. An employee pushes a trolley into the meeting room, followed by a late lunch of pumpkin curry, salad and rice.
Big’s brother Hans, an engineer by trade, comes in to discuss some technical issues. Tomorrow we’re going to an art foundry in St. Gallen, Switzerland, the artist is working on a new series of works. The idea is simple and starts with a piece of paper. Cut in a couple of times and fold the hanging ends into the slits. It only takes a few seconds, but the translation into an expansive installation is tough.
Total resultatorientiert: Katharina Grosse
Which: © Gordon Welters
A blazing cascade of colors entitled “Canyon” has been hanging in the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, built by Frank Gehry, since October 2022. It consists of aluminum sheet five millimeters thick and still weighs four tons. Grosse wants to simplify the construction. On the upper floor, next to the spray guns, paint bottles and a brightly splattered sink, there is a table roller. It can be used to gently bend aluminum pieces. Sculpture models made of different materials hang from the ceiling. “The surface is incongruent,” says Grosse, which is precise on the one hand and at the same time a mental abstraction, just as she can effortlessly switch back and forth between concrete details and overriding ideas – perhaps one reason why she loves models and rooms that how models work.
A piece of paper written in red by hand reads “Not now – not now!” One question looms over Grosse’s work: How can you work creatively and still keep the big business running? Maybe by changing the location. She spends a few months every winter in New Zealand, where her partner, the artist Judy Millar, is from.
Grosse then paints alone in her studio by the sea. When she returns to Berlin in the spring, Grosse says, she will pick up the loose threads again. Grosse easily refutes the widespread prejudice that as an artist you can just go straight to work. She says: “Working in a process means being totally result-oriented. If you’re not, you can’t have a process.”
Luminous acrylic paints
She never delegates her main process, painting. The traces are unmistakable. Luminous acrylic paint settles on tools and light switches like colorful dew, she stores them in buckets on steel shelves. Will she still spray today? Let’s see. First of all there is a meeting with the musician Stefan Schneider. The two have already recorded an album of electronic instrumental music.
Grosse, Schneider now sketches the rooms of the Max Hetzler Gallery on Potsdamer Strasse. You want to appear there at the end of Grosse’s solo show in the gallery, on the penultimate day of the Berlin Gallery Weekend. Collaborations suit both of them. The language turns to Alexander Kluge, with whom Grosse wrote a book last year. The 91-year-old filmmaker also inspired her when working on “The Separatrix Project” with his pleasantly relativizing perspective: “Katharina”, she quotes him, “we are on the edge of the Milky Way!”
And the earth keeps turning. It’s 5 p.m. We drive through the Tiergarten tunnel to the gallery in Berlin-Schoeneberg. Schneider and Grosse stand in the middle of the hall where the newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel” was once printed. What was an empty space in the studio in Groß Kreutz is here a picture with defined borders. The room echoes, warns an employee. On the other hand, it’s empty now, that will be different at the concert. Up to 10,000 people will walk through the rooms here for the Berlin Gallery Weekend from April 28th to 30th.
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