The renowned contemporary artist Katharina Grosse, whose exhibition Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions is on view this fall at the Kemper Art Museum, is known for large-scale artworks that explore and expand the physical properties, material presence, optical effects and aesthetic potentials of color and paint. She was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in August 2020 for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. In the resulting half-hour video, Grosse reflects on central elements of her work: color, place, and structures; social responsibility and the role of art; and the significance to her of having grown up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, under the dark shadow of its recent history.

Select Quotes

On traveling: “I like to get to know a new place. I like to be a stranger to a place—to come as a person that is not part of a place, a space, a location…. So being abroad became a very important part of my studio life.”

On her youth: “When I woke up in the morning, I would see shadows in the room and I would imagine a paintbrush to paint them away. I was very convinced of things even though they couldn’t work. And I was very convincing even though my results did not match my conviction. Sometimes my surroundings wouldn’t agree and I was surprised. I was truly imagining something that maybe wasn’t visible. I was always very confident in terms of art. Without reason really.”

On her audience: “I don’t know whether or not I can describe myself as outgoing. I like to be by myself; I have no problem being by myself for days and days and days. But I do believe that I make the work for somebody else. I don’t think about public as such, but I absolutely want it to be seen. And I think it has to be loud and noisy.”

Credits

Camera: Niclas Reed Middleton

Editing: Klaus Elmer

Production: Marc-Christoph Wagner

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2021

Support: Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond

About Louisiana Channel

Louisiana Channel is a not-for-profit website of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, that produces art and culture videos on an ongoing basis. An integral part of the museum’s development as a cultural platform capable of engaging a new generation in its cultural heritage, in an intelligent present, and in an ambitious future, Louisiana Channel extends the importance of art and culture to the internet.

Image credit

Still from Katharina Grosse: On the Edge of Something Else (2021).