Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse is known for her immersive environments in which draped fabrics and rocks and stones sprayed in bright and vivid colours form visually striking alien-like sets.
Throughout the years Grosse's practice developed, transitioning from canvas to space: the artist moved from one main principle, the fact that a painting can land anywhere, "on an egg, in the crook of the arm, along a train platform, in snow and ice, or on the beach," as she states.
She therefore gradually eliminated the canvas and opted to create artificial site-specific three-dimensional works using an industrial air compressor, a spray gun and mounds of pigmented dirt, a technique that allows her to control the trajectory of the aerosol in paint in a planned way, establishing a connection between the body of the artist and the surrounding space. In this way Grosse also alters reality and the familiar shapes of objects, destroying their functions, attributions, and hierarchies.
When you find yourself surrounded by her works that often comprise piles of soil and rubble, draped textiles and blocks of Styrofoam carved into shapes that resemble fragments of meteorites, you don't know if you're standing in a real environment or in a virtual one as Grosse's colours are usually extremely vivid and bright and point at digitally enhanced nuances.
Last month Grosse opened her first solo show in China: curated by Venus Lau, "Mumbling Mud" develops at the basement level of the K11 art museum (K11 Art Mall, 300 Huaihai Road Central) in Shanghai (until 24th February 2019; the show will then tour through the chi K11 art spaces in other major cities in the country, including Guangzhou and Wuhan).
Some of the themes for the exhibition were developed during the summer: in July 2018, Grosse travelled to China and met Chinese artists who previously worked with the K11 Art Foundation, including Li Ming and Cui Jie, as well as prominent artist Zheng Guogu, who is known for his ongoing art project Liao Garden (formerly The Age of the Empire). Grosse developed with them a series of debates and discussions about art making and themes related to "Mumbling Mud".
The impressive exhibition consists in five site-related, immersive installations extending in the 1,500 sqm museum and giving the opportunity to visitors to wander in familiar spaces made unfamiliar and strange by vibrant shades and colours.
In the exhibition title "mumbling" refers to an intermediate state between speaking and silence, while "mud" is an intermediate state between the solid and the liquid.
The first zone of the exhibition is dubbed "Underground", a title hinting at the fact that chi K11 art museum is next to a subway station and beneath the ground.
Grosse took piles of soil and building materials from Shanghai's local markets, sprayed them with paint and created an uncanny landscape in this part, that could be interpreted as a vision out of an hallucinated dream or as a post-apocalyptic environment.
The second part of the event is dedicated to "Ghost", a complex sculpture carved out of Styrofoam (and evoking in its shapes the sleek silhouettes of parametric architectures à la Zaha Hadid) that activates when visitors move around it and explore it.
The sections that follow do have some links with fashion as they are created using yards of fabrics and textiles: "Silk Studio" is an environment made of curtains with silk printed photographs of Grosse's studio in Berlin. This is an attempt at creating links and memories between a space located in another country and the Shanghai museum.
"Stomach" is instead a labyrinthine structure of folds made with heavy, coarse fabrics draped from the ceiling of the museum and designed to emnbrace, engulf and swallow visitors and alter with their perceptions with their clashing colours.
The exhibition closes with "Showroom", an entire living room that has been painted over by Grosse in gray and pastel colours. While the furniture reconnect the visitors to the shopping mall in which the exhibition spaces are located, the modern domestic environment also poses new questions about the role of art in everyday life.
As a whole "Mumbling Mud" is a psychedelic-like experience showing Grosse's inventive use of materials and colours and the more you stare at these environments, the more you know that the artist will soon be co-opted by the fashion industry: you can bet her wastelands of beauty will indeed reach at some point a new stage in their lives and become arty and eye catching sets for catwalk shows.
Image credits for this post
Installation views of Katharina Grosse's "Mumbling Mud" at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai, 2018. Photo JJYPHOTO. Courtesy K11 Art Foundation and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan. Copyright Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
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