Katharina Grosse: It’s very fascinating for me
to reset the idea what a painting can be.
It’s not like a formal issue only about volume and color,
but it’s also how could painting appear in this public space?
The surface is very rough and clunky,
and I do something like a watercolor on top,
which is quite bizarre.
So it’s actually a very intimate kind of painting,
but just on a very large scale.
So it’s as if you’re thinking out loud,
that’s a little bit how I work.
And what comes up in the end is a volume floating through this forest.
I saw the space and had immediately the feeling it could be very, very interesting to work
with the trees--
to make the trees a very and significant part of the overall image that would come about.
I’m very fascinated by the power of these iconic images like the tree, the soil,
the landscape.
The trees are so strict, like little soldiers in that park.
I thought, if I could place something in between the trees that looks like gigantic driftwood,
that has come and swept in with some sort of power
that we can’t explain, but now it’s there.
The sheer presence of these things of different size
makes us think of something that must have happened,
but we can’t quite say what it is.
The trees are very fragile and small, but yet they are taller than the work.
The trees also give a certain scale to my work.
The buildings around them are quite big and that’s a big challenge for an outdoor work.
There’s a big team effort needed to do these large sculptural works, especially for MetroTech.
That was the biggest piece I’ve done ever.
Eighteen pieces we needed to produce in a relatively short amount of time.
I made models and then we discussed it via Skype.
Amaral had to make these works,
laminate them,
make them durable and hard with fiberglass and resin.
We needed people to handle it, to prime it,
to get it into place to understand how the pieces would work together.
I started to work with my brother three years ago.
He is an engineer.
It’s the first time I have somebody in my team who is not coming from an art context.
He joined us when I was doing a huge project for the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin
where we constructed ellipses that were leaning against walls.
And the ellipses were about 30 feet high.
We had to work with a boat builder and a structural engineer,
putting them together and hoisting them into place.
That was a great moment.
He has a really great way to connect the theoretical thinking that’s needed
to understand the engineering process,
and he knows the language and all the words.
And then he can still come back to me at the end of the day and say,
look we need that kind of bolt here.
We were very, very close when we were kids.
He grew into an indispensable member of my team.
My parents took us to a lot of things when we were small.
I was seeing paintings, drawings.
We would also go to the theatre lots.
And both my parents are very influential in that respect.
My mother would draw and paint,
but also then cook and bring us to music lessons.
And she didn’t label herself artist.
I started to tell myself that I actually had a mother who was an artist.
She was the one to find out that I maybe had visual talent.
One morning I had done a little watercolor.
I had copied a black and white photograph from a newspaper.
She thought it was amazing.
She urged me to go on.
My mom would also make us paint the garage walls.
She would gather all the kids and say, let’s make little drawings and
see what the big picture could be like.
It was a natural thing to paint things.
My work is not idea based, it’s really thought based.
The thought is a more fluid feel that gets feedback
and is being changed while I do what I do.
So there is an overall agreement that I have with myself as I start something.
That agreement is based on a judgment.
For example, I want to have two elements coincide that exclude one another.
How could that work in that painting or in that situation that I have in a gallery
with a certain architectural setup?
As I work, as I use my painting tools and colors,
then I am getting an instantaneous feedback by the materialization of that first agreement
that might then change the relationship I have with the agreement.
All these notions,
the further steps that are changing again and again,
that is that thought process that I find infinitely interesting,
that can’t be fixed and written down as I start.
I wanted to do something for the Nasher that was not a sculpture
and that was not really using the space as a display space.
There are two very large glass panels
and the rest is just walls.
And you could move through this.
So you, you had the vista through the building,
into the garden and in the garden were plants and sculptures that looked a little bit alike.
How do you actually make yourself visible in that situation?
Something like negative space coinciding with super large paint movements.
Quite amazing that my invitation to a sculpture museum coincides with
a moment where I wanted to do a negative space of volume
with a painting sitting on top of that negative space.
That is a fantastic confrontation of these two thoughts.
I started to see that experiment as something that would just sit in the space
as if it was taken out of the box and discarded.
So I did not want the piece in relationship to other things,
I just wanted to have it leaning against a wall
so that it would sit exactly where the wall and the floor meet
and that kind of joint would be then covered by the thing that I do.
So you can’t really tell the floor and the wall apart anymore
because they are in terms of color very close in the Nasher with the limestone and the floor.
And I did something for them that would move out of the space as well.
So I wanted something that was inside and was going outside behind the glass panel.
This is the Kunsthaus in Graz in Austria and it’s an amazing building.
It’s a bubble.
It’s a very organic shape.
And I’m going to do a show there which has to do with
one of my core questions,
how can painting appear in space and what do I need to show the painting?
I don’t want to put walls in the space that then
enable me to show canvases.
The metal cage is the roof.
We made it this way so that I can work in the space from above.
These Styrofoam blocks are solid walls that I could also possibly paint on.
Other than the Styrofoam blocks I have no walls that define the space.
There are no windows except these openings in the ceiling where I have lights.
I’m using canvas or some very thick cloth, maybe some sort of sailcloth.
And I want to crumple it.
And at times I want to make a painting on that surface
and at other times,
you can just walk on the canvas or can walk through the exhibition.
The painting process is all going to be done on site.
We are trying to find out, how can I build these creases and these folds
to scale?
Because I find the space that is coming about by folding things quite interesting.
I like that you are walking in a structure that is difficult to see as a whole.
I’m really fascinated by that condition of us being
in something and at the same time looking at it.
I think that’s the condition we have all the time.
That has a lot to do with scale.
I think that we are able to think so big and at the same time
we’re actually quite small in relationship to what is around us.
So you’re constantly changing in size as you walk through.
The scale shift in this exhibition is really something that I’m very interested in.
That, that is also what I thought was in Nasher so fascinating.
The dirt room downstairs was the only space
that didn’t have any relationship to the outside garden.
And upstairs I had the more analytical piece that was actually confronted with,
with the garden and the plants and so on.
I’m very adventuresome.
I grew up hiking and climbing in the mountains.
Later on I started to be very fascinated with the space that you encounter
in landscape and in painting a landscape,
because you’re sitting somewhere vast and you have this 360 degree angle around you.
And then you start to think is there an order?
What do I perceive?
And how do I actually design an order for what I’m surrounded by?
Landscape is an un-bureaucratic space.
The hierarchic shift is so fast in landscape.
Something that was useful a minute ago turns out to be
not so interesting two steps further to the right, for example.
So there is a very unstable, very fluid sense for hierarchy in landscape.
WOMAN #1: I’m really curious to know how the idea
about the piece came up
and where you got your inspiration from.
Katharina Grosse: Everybody knows a tree, one way or another.
You go into the park or into the woods.
But something has happened to the trees,
we don’t know what it is,
but they are not where they normally are.
I love what happens to this material and to this image when it’s painted.
That turns it to something else.
Something that’s not the tree and at the same time it’s a tree.
And I love this paradox.
WOMAN #1: So that’s where the title originates also?
Katharina Grosse: Yeah, you don’t really know.
You see something far away and then you think, oh that’s, that looks like a bird.
And then you come close and it’s a plastic bag.
And I think this kind of ambiguity is there all the time.
WOMAN #1: Was it the first time that you have been
working with this kind of material?
Katharina Grosse: With a tree?
Yeah.
WOMAN #1: With the tree?
Katharina Grosse: I was starting to be interested in this whole
tradition of the painted sculpture,
of the painted 3-D thing you know.
And I’ve used a couple of these things that are so strong,
like the dirt or the soil,
that is so important to our life.
The woods are really amazing as a structure as all of a sudden this linear thing splits.
WOMAN #2: So you had a few pieces, how did you put them together?
Katharina Grosse: You can see, here is a cut.
That’s the tree.
This one was put together.
So it’s all fiction.
Once you are starting to feel, ah, that’s a real tree,
you see the cut.
It’s more like an edited tree.
WOMAN #2: Right.
Katharina Grosse: Yeah.
WOMAN #2: And how did you choose the colors?
Katharina Grosse: It has to do with the light that you have
in the space.
The space is quite dark.
So I wanted to have something that reflects as well,
so the yellow was important for me.
The yellow in front of here does something totally different
than the yellow behind the roots.
Right.
Because it kind of glows.
WOMAN #2: Yeah.
Katharina Grosse: The colors I use are so raw, they are not mixed.
I like this raw, direct thing that they have with your body.
It’s like voice, like the voice of a singer I think,
that’s what color very much has.
WOMAN #1: Yeah, you had a lot to say.
Katharina Grosse: Yeah, yeah.
I had a lot to say, yeah, yeah.
MAN #1: All the blocks form one large canvas.
Now that Katharina has painted, we need to put that canvas back together.
So that’s why lining up the marks of her brushstrokes,
if you will,
is very important and actually vital to the sculpture itself.
Katharina Grosse: Am I a painter?
Am I a sculptor?
I don’t know.
I’m talking to the world while painting on it.
Or with it.
Or in it.
Therefore there is a collision of things with the painted image.
Something comes about by this collision that can’t be taken apart anymore.
There is the plastic or sculptural thing.
If I take it away, the painting isn’t there anymore
and if I take my painting away,
then this metamorphosis isn’t there anymore.
So these things kind of stick together, even though they are coming from two very
distinctive worlds.
It’s not necessary to decide that you are a painter or a sculptor.
It doesn’t make your work more radical or more clear.
I totally enjoy to look at things.
And I want something cool to look at.
So I make this for myself also a lot.
I immensely enjoy when doing it what comes out of it during the making.
I amuse myself, you know, I entertain myself.
But it has to be complex and fun and ridiculous and tricky.
There, it’s about tricks, that I play to myself and to others.
I am the trickster really, the painting trickster.
Don’t believe me, I guess.