Katharina Grosse :
Installation at the Danube University Krems

Following Heinz Gappmayr's text work and the Over-all Doublette by Peter Kogler and Marcus Geiger, the influential German painter Katharina Grosse completed the stairwell project in the main building of the Danube University Krems with a colourful spray shower. The artist's site-bound colour installation begins on the 3rd floor, and continues down to ground level as a receding flow of paint. The actual space with its corners, protrusions and angles encounters the illusionistic space. Grosse applies painting as an open interplay of relationships between colour formations and the concrete givens of the architecture. She extends and alters the mutual interplay between space and image by covering objects like handrails and radiators with a veil of paint from the spray gun along with the wall, ceiling and floor. While the students stand in or traverse the installation they experience the contradiction between absolute dematerialisation and the simultaneously intense physical presence of colour and space. Katharina Grosse frees the painting from the limitations of its support and enters new dimensions by torpedoing our apparent familiarity with the tradition of painting. Her situation specific abstract paintings emphasise the expansion of colour instead of the hermeticism of the brushstroke, they accentuate movement and not standstill and stagnation, they lend significance to the ephemeral, the changing, and not to the unmovable. What could be a more suitable approach to a lively new educational facility.
(Brigitte Huck)