Katharina Grosse in "Fiction" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.