Katharina Grosse is known internationally for her expansive works, which she paints on-site, often including extensive sections of exterior spaces. Less attention has been paid to the works done on canvas in her studio. The upcoming exhibition is the first to conduct a comprehensive inquiry into this part of Grosse’s oeuvre, from the late 1980s all the way to her most recent works.

The large-format and extremely powerful paintings of Katharina Grosse subvert the conventional relationships between foreground and background, between surface and ground, between the area of the canvas and the edges of the picture, thereby opening up new imaginative worlds both within and beyond the work of art. Through an open-ended creative process in which painting takes on performative characteristics, Grosse rethinks fundamental issues which have defined the history of painting for a long time.

The exhibition is divided into two large thematic fields: Returns/Revisions/Inventions and Fissures/Ruptures. The theme Returns/Revisions/Inventions includes a broad array of paintings created since the early 1990s and sheds light on the artist’s cyclical manner of working.

Fissures/Ruptures concentrates on the various methods with which Grosse breaks up the medium of painting in order to extend its borders. This endeavor involves the inclusion of natural materials such as soil and branches so as to reinterpret the customary relationship between painting and physical space.

The exhibition features around forty paintings, most of them in a large format. It is being realized in collaboration with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis (USA) and the Kunstmuseum Bern. It was conceived in St. Louis, where it was curated by Dr. Sabine Eckmann (William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator).