Untitled, 2015

Acrylic on canvas
Image courtesy the Shah Garg Foundation. Photo by Ian Reeves

Katharina Grosse discovered the spray gun in the 1990s while living in Marseille, a city with a thriving graffiti culture. Fascinated by the way the sprayed paint sat on the surface “like many little dots,” she began experimenting with the spray gun in 1998, having purchased equipment of her own on her return to her native Germany. Providing an uninterrupted flow of paint and a vast reach, the spray gun offered seemingly limitless creative possibilities. Technical freedom resulted in a dramatic escalation of scale, leading to the large, site-specific installations for which she is best known, wherein she engulfs interiors, architecture, and landscapes with explosive color. Despite this predisposition of Grosse’s, painting in the studio has also remained a constant. While she produces her meticulously planned installations, she revisits and reworks the studio canvases. Untitled is one such work. To create it, the artist placed stencils over the canvas before spraying multiple hues of paint onto it (some of the colors in broad fields, some in distinct lines) to create one layer; then, she rearranged the stencils to create another layer; and so on. The result is a bold and overwhelming composition.