Katharina Grosse

Modena's Palazzina dei Giardini as it has never been seen before: an explosion of colour, of energy and power, an architectural framework shown in an entirely new light, transformed by the artist to house her three-dimensional painting. An abstract theatre of experimentation, in which each and every detail is transformed by the hand of the painter.

Following in the footsteps of Ugo Rondinone, Yayoi Kusama, Adrian Paci, Katharina Fritsch and Heimo Zobernig, also Katharina Grosse has chosen the Galleria Civica di Modena to host her first solo exhibition in a public Italian museum space.

From her large format canvases, to objects like stones and balloons, to earth, to the walls, ceilings and floors: Katharina Grosse makes use of both old and new painting media. Of German origins, she is among the painters of the last generation who have gained greatest recognition on an international level.

After a long and intense work to be undertaken at the beginning of August and put together by Grosse herself especially for the exhibition space in the historical ducal hothouse, on Friday 19th September at 6 pm at the Palazzina dei Giardini in corso Canalgrande, Modena, the exhibition "Un altro uomo che ha fatto sgocciolare il suo pennello" ("Another man who has dropped the paintbrush") will be inaugurated. A tongue-in-cheek title, and one which alludes both to a technique and a specific pictorial movement – dripping – the most famous exponents of which include Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, and also to painting as a whole, long considered a male-dominated field.

Organised and produced by the Galleria Civica di Modena as well as by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, the exhibition is curated by Milovan Farronato together with Angela Vettese, and will open alongside the initiatives of the festivalfilosofia, held in Modena from the 19th until the 21st September 2008, dedicated this year to the theme of Imagination. The show is organized in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Mailand.

Interested largely in the "How" side of painting – i.e. the gesture freed from the surrounding area of the canvas – Grosse carries out uninterrupted pictorial interventions: she works with an air compressor, allowing her in theory to apply an endless stroke, going beyond the use of the canvas as the sole support. The artist is constantly on the lookout for new materials, experimenting with the yield and potency of her colours and coming up with images that appear to be perpetually in movement.

Inside the Palazzina dei Giardini, a series of already painted canvases will be positioned and then repainted in loco. The painting will thus spill over onto the walls, floor and all the surrounding spaces.

"Katharina Grosse," writes Milovan Farronato, "is an artist who takes over the exhibition space, at times highlighting and at other times departing from the architectural structure. Hers is an exploded painting which contemplates expression in terms of volume thus becoming a composite environment, the logic of which is defined in terms of ratios of scale, the coming together/clashing of the full and the void, negative and positive traces, yet never left to chance. It is an emancipated pictorial approach, the fruit of her continuous studio experimentation and an ongoing relationship with her own expressive medium."

The exhibition, which will remain on display until 6th January 2009, will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Koenig containing a wide range of images of the installations on show, along with critical texts by the curator Milovan Farronato as well as the head of the Galleria Civica di Modena, Angela Vettese, and an interview to Katharina Grosse by Arno Brandlhuber.

Katharina Grosse
Un altro uomo che ha fatto sgocciolare il suo pennello
Ort: Palazzina dei Giardini, Modena