[Katharina Grosse: Painting with Color]
[Katharina Grosse Studio, Berlin, Germany]
I got to write this poem down here on my wrist--
on my arm.
Stilton cheese.
I'm going to make a Christmas card for my friends.
One side of the card is going to be a photograph of a poem that I really like.
I've written it down on paper,
and I think maybe it's better on my skin.
When I started painting, I stopped reading.
In school, I loved to learn languages and read things,
and I really stopped that at the moment that I started painting.
And I didn't know why.
It took me a little while to understand why I did it.
It's a poem by an Austrian poet,
and his name is Ernst Jandl,
and he's made a lot of really fantastic poems that are just sound, and...
yeah, they're super fascinating.
The linguistic structure urges you towards a certain order system
where things follow one another, which is very linear.
And I realize that painting does not have a linear structure;
but the synchronicity in painting is super compelling for your thought process.
[sound of the camera phone's shutter clicking]
Okay, we have to do it again.
It's very rare that you read something profound and fundamental on color.
Modern critics write about the concept on what you can see
or what is being dealt with politically or socially;
but, painting being discussed in the realm of color is never happening.
Interestingly enough, color is an element in painting that has always been discussed
from the 17th Century on--in the big academy in Paris or wherever--
as the female, less stable, less clear, and not so intelligent element of painting,
whereas the concept--the line, the drawing--
is more the male, the clear, the progressive, and intelligent part of the artwork.
I think that I am dealing with this heritage in an interesting way,
because color is such a very very important spatial feature in my work,
in relationship to the crystallized and built and materialized world
that is part of what I do when I paint in space.
I like this anarchic potential of color.
I see it very clearly that color is actually taking away the boundary of the object.
So there is no subject-object relationship anymore.
And I think that's maybe what color has the potential to make us think.
[Johann König Gallery, Berlin, Germany]
It's the first time I'm showing works on paper in a show.
When I came back from my annual surfing holiday, [LAUGHS]
I started with works on paper and I kept going.
And I found it very interesting
and I could develop a lot of things very fast.
All the different actions go together on one surface,
so it's a little bit like violence in a movie,
which kind of accelerates time and compresses time.
So, shortening the process of thinking and acting.
Also, it's without resistance to work on these small formats
as opposed to the large pieces where the material resistance is very strong
and makes the painting less fluid and mobile.
What I'm doing with my work is to kind of grasp some of those
fast thoughts that run through my brain,
and maybe painting is one of the ways to actually
make those visible and understandable for myself.