Grifting: Katharina Grosse
German artist Katharina Grosse's room-sized paintings are made with neon-dosed airbrushes, industrial cranes, and massive, skewed canvasses wedged into piles of rubble. I've seen them in museums all over the world, and they never seem out of place; this is probably because their soft-techno color schemes and enveloping scale give any space a sense of gritty grandeur, although deterrents might argue that, despite Grosse's anarchic graffiti-inspired haze, she is essentially a conservative artist. Her work's underlying motivation seems to be "showing the versatility of painting," or exploring the textural possibilities of working outside of the canvas, on mounds of dirt, inflated balloons, and industrial scrap, which isn't exactly a radical concept and is clearly ported from more marginal practices. Certainly, the textures are wonderful, the softness of airbrush on pebbles, but I can't help but thinking of the closing of the show and of gallery workers diligently white-washing the walls.
"Picture Park" is grifted here from the GoMA at Queensland Art Gallery, in Brisbane, Australia.