Work

  • Ohne Titel, 2018 • acrylic on canvas, 240 x 157 cm
    Ohne Titel, 2018 • acrylic on canvas, 240 x 157 cm
  • Ohne Titel, 2003 • acrylic on aluminium comb board, 95 x 228 cm
    Ohne Titel, 2003 • acrylic on aluminium comb board, 95 x 228 cm
  • «The Horse Trotted Another Couple Of Metres Then It Stopped» 2017 • Installation view at Carriageworks, Sydney
    «The Horse Trotted Another Couple Of Metres Then It Stopped» 2017 • Installation view at Carriageworks, Sydney
  • Unpainting, 2017 • Installation view at the Art Gallery NSW, Sydney, Australia (AUS)
    Unpainting, 2017 • Installation view at the Art Gallery NSW, Sydney, Australia (AUS)
  • Katharina Grosse, 2016 • Installation view for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York, USA
    Katharina Grosse, 2016 • Installation view for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York, USA
  • Katharina Grosse, 2016 • Installation view for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York, USA
    Katharina Grosse, 2016 • Installation view for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York, USA

News

Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse

Jul 1, 2019 – Feb 23, 2020

Stretching nearly twenty feet wide by eight feet high, Mural (1943) is the largest painting Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) ever made, and it proved a breakthrough for the artist. Across the painting’s dense and vibrant surface, Pollock’s bold brushstrokes appear to dance rhythmically. Today, Mural is recognized as one of the pivotal achievements of Pollock’s career, the moment when he left figuration behind, expanded the scale of his work, and started to develop his signature drip technique. “I took one look at it,” the critic Clement Greenberg later said, “and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced.”

At the MFA, Mural is presented alongside a newly commissioned work by German painter Katharina Grosse (b. 1961). Known for her large-scale site-related installations, Grosse is one of the most important painters of her generation. Since the late 1990s, she has used an industrial paint-sprayer to apply prismatic swaths of color to a variety of surfaces, eroding the distinction between two and three dimensions to create immersive visual experiences.

The unprecedented pairing of Pollock and Grosse’s work demonstrates how the artists have each transformed painting through their innovative techniques and approaches to color on a massive scale.

Frozen Gesture

May 18 – Aug 18, 2019

In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein created his famous «brushstrokes» and in so doing transformed the subjective gesture of heroic Modernism into a trivial comic drawing, transposed into the large format of a museum. The spontaneous movement of the brush on canvas mutated into a quote, the emotional exploration of depth morphed into a Pop surface in signal colors. The purported immediacy of the expressive painterly act thus became an ironic reflection on the medium of painting using the means of mass culture. This distanced and self-reflective approach had defined contemporary painting since the end of Modernism. It highlighted the fundamental elements of the image, such as the appearance of the colors and the pigment, the color fields and their limits, and not least the application of paint in the form of a gesture.

This gesture had long since abandoned directly expressing existence in favor of any number of different discursive strategies and painterly approaches. To this day, artists underscore the problematic nature of the impact of the application of color and are forever reinterpreting it – from the gesture as a semiotic abbreviation for painting through to its diverse transformations in images.

In the form of the extensive «Frozen Gesture» exhibition Kunst Museum Winterthur is presenting the sheer range of gestures in contemporary painting. The exhibition brings together important individual pieces by outstanding protagonists of Abstract Art, such as Gerhard Richter and David Reed, with extensive work groups of contemporary artists such as Franz Ackermann, Pia Fries, Katharina Grosse and Judy Millar – to create a fascinating display of works of exceptional painterly quality and inconceivable sensory appeal.

The Way We Are 1.0

Mar 30, 2019 – Jan 5, 2020

Opening: Mar 29, 2019, 7 pm

Starting at the end of March 2019, the collection presentation “The Way We Are 1.0” will be featured on two floors constituting more than half of the overall exhibition space of the Weserburg. The exhibition includes works from a large number of collections, some of which have enjoyed a long association with the institution while others are new additions; also on display will be works from the Weserburg’s own collection as well as loans by artists who will be participating in a show at the Weserburg for the first time. The Way We Are 1.0 investigates more than one hundred and forty works by eighty artists from various contexts and times with regard to both their contents and their form. This focus gives rise to a succession of spaces which identify the thread connecting works of art from the 1960s all the way to today and which approach the themes of these works from various perspectives. The exhibition tracks down images of nature or special aspects of daily life; it explores such themes as the body, time or memory; it turns its attention to urban spaces or characteristics of language; and it presents fundamental positions of painterly abstraction or minimalist formal language.

HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC

Mar 1 – Aug 4, 2019

Opening: Feb 28, 2019, 7 pm

Sound, vision, film, a destroyed piano: What happens when musicians make use of ideas and strategies from the art world? And what kind of pictures result when painters are influenced by music? To be interested in the lives of others, to pursue the unknown, to copy it, to use it in one’s own work – in short: to conduct a cross-mapping between the worlds of music and the visual arts: this is the subject of the exhibition HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC curated by the former editor-in-chief of Spex and Electronic Beats, Max Dax.

Gallery Exhibitions

Group Show (Adieu Gessnerallee!)

Jan 15 – Mar 12, 2011