NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian announces Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips, an exhibition of new paintings by Katharina Grosse at its gallery at Park & 75, New York. This exhibition follows Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, a retrospective that originated at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis and traveled to the Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunstmuseum Bonn through September 2024.
Grosse uses a compressor-driven spray gun to apply industrial paints directly onto landscapes, architecture, objects, and panels. This tool extends her reach and accelerates her gestures, balancing impulsiveness with intent. In her studio outside Berlin, she produces works on canvas in a practice that is consistent with the spontaneous flow of her improvisational, performative process. Painting in the studio also permits her to develop works over a longer period than the institutional and organizational constraints of her in-situ projects generally allow.
In her studio paintings as much as in her environmental works, Grosse uses paint to claim territory at immersive scales, introducing new conceptions of color and space that disorient and reorient the viewer. To make them, she sprays paint onto unstretched canvases in a varied palette of vibrant primary and secondary hues, making use of chromatic and spatial juxtaposition. The propulsive, rhythmic marks traverse the paintings as tapering lines and whiplash curves that spiral back on themselves, capturing the trajectories of the artist’s full-body movements.
The exhibition’s title, Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips, breaks down the elements of language and reassembles them into idiosyncratic structures, like a revolving thought, repeated but anagrammatically, illogically reversed. Likewise, conventional relationships between figure and ground in these paintings are superseded by layered forms that appear to move with tumultuous fluidity over and under one another. Grosse intertwines and twists strands of color, creating spatial complexities that confuse a sequential reading. Confronting the viewer with immediately impactful compositions, the paintings also invite sustained attention to comprehend their pictorial entanglements.
Grosse’s expansive gestures extend over the paintings’ edges, alluding to spaces beyond the canvas; one senses that there is more than can be seen. This approach resonates with the speed, directness, and boundlessness that is central to Grosse’s practice, engaged as it is with the possibilities of abstraction in art, but also by diverse relationships with the external world, from prelingual thoughts to the visceral impact of music.
Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Nationalgalerie Berlin; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Exhibitions and on-site paintings include Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX (1999); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2001); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2007); One Floor Up More Highly, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2010); Third Man Begins Digging Through Her Pockets, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2012); Wunderblock, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2013); psychylustro, Mural Arts Philadelphia (2014); Untitled Trumpet, 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); Rockaway!, MoMA PS1 at Fort Tilden, New York (2016); Mural: Jackson Pollock/Katharina Grosse, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019–20); Is it You?, Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us, Helsinki Art Museum (2021–22); Chill Seeping, Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2022); Apollo, Apollo, Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice (2022); Splinter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022–23, traveled to Kunstmuseum Bern, 2023; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2024); and Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2024–25). Grosse’s permanent installation Canyon was unveiled at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2022.
