Katharina Grosse and her work

          Katharina Grosse is a German artist who brilliant at painting and sculptures/installation art.  Her artworks vary from paper based paintings to 3D sculpture paintings. She grew up in an art friendly background and her mother’s influence helped her to become an artist. Her artworks are the results of her obsession of scale and colors. 

The public installation artwork called just the two of us is the biggest artwork done by Katharina Grosse. It’s a series of massive multi-colored acrylic on glass-fiber reinforced plastic sculptures installed in Metro Plaza Commons, downtown Brooklyn during the time period of October 2013 to September 2014. This is 18 piece sculptures which were created in the studio then reassemble at the MetroTech commons plaza. The inspiration behind this sculpture is the fascinating power of natural iconic images such as trees, soil, and landscape. This artwork looks like a volume floating through the forest at distance. The way colors painted on the sculpture gave a sense of motion around the strict inactive trees.  Those tall trees and big building gave a certain scale to the sculpture.  Colors, shape, and scale of the sculpture gave am eye popping feeling in the relatively dull environment.

 This beautiful massive sculpture was at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas in 2013. She wanted to do an artwork that not uses the display space in the sculpture center. This sculpture was sitting against the wall in the negative space. Major part of the sculpture sitting inside the museum and the other part of this sculpture moving out of the space through the glass panel. One will see this sculpture as a massive movement of various colors from a distance.

Name of this painted sculpture is “I Think This Is a Pine Tree.” Katharina Grosse used acrylic on wall, floor, tree trunks and roots to make this artwork. She chooses unmixed colors to match accordingly with the quite dark space. She says that yellow color was important to her. Yellow color on the front of the artworks and yellow color on roots are completely different. Grosse took an object that everybody knows and turn it to a something else that has a feeling of mystery. During the interview Katharina Grosse explains how she came up with this artwork; she says, “Something has happened to the trees. We don’t know what it is. But they are not where they normally are.”