Katharina Grosse Untitled. 2009

Acrylic and soil on canvas. 220 × 130 cm (86 ⅝ × 51 ⅛ in.). Signed, dated and inscribed with the work number in black felt-tip pen on the reverse: K. Grosse 2009 2009_1007. A label from Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich, affixed to the stretcher. [3211], Acrylic and soil on canvas. 220 × 130 cm (86 ⅝ × 51 ⅛ in.). Signed, dated and inscribed with the work number in black felt-tip pen on the reverse: K. Grosse 2009 2009_1007. A label from Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich, affixed to the stretcher. [3211], Private collection, Switzerland (acquired from Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich, in 2009), Private collection, Switzerland (acquired from Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich, in 2009), Katharina Grosse, Colin McCahon, The Greedy I. Zurich, Galerie Mark Müller, 2009, Katharina Grosse felt there was no reason for painting to stop at the edge of a canvas. She painted beyond it, spraying walls, floors and entire buildings, even her own bed and pillows. In 1998, at the Kunsthalle Bern, she pointed her compressor-powered spray gun, loaded with green acrylic paint, into an upper corner of the room. That same year, a monumental painting brought her success at the 11th Biennale of Sydney, marking her international breakthrough. Her defining experience came when she was twenty and painting in the landscape: “There, you have a 360-degree view. It’s not about sitting in front of a wall; everything is always all around you.” Since then, she has explored every form of painting outdoors, aptly describing the process as follows: “I paint myself out of the space.” She has created vast outdoor installations, including one for the Messeplatz at Art Basel 2025, while continuing to work with the confined format of the canvas. For Grosse, these are not opposing approaches but part of a single, continuous process of painting. Discoveries made in smaller works feed directly into her monumental compositions. In 2009, the year the present work was created, Grosse increasingly combined acrylic paint with soil and focused intently on the relationship between the bounded surface and the expansive space of installation. Having extended her painting into the boundless, she now sought to translate these spatial experiences back into painting on canvas: “I am beginning to find an equivalent in the canvases for the doubling of space in the in-situ works.” The present painting offers a compelling expression of this idea. Its composition extends beyond the limits of the canvas. One need only imagine the white rays continuing to see where they would intersect beyond the lower edge of the picture. Behind these rays, which were presumably created using stencils, bands of colour cross one another, generating an extraordinary sense of depth. From above, a soft, irregular cloud with frayed, granular edges and sprayed particles of earth descends into the picture, resembling a fragile fabric through whose holes an intense blue and green glow. The layers of colour receding into the depths belong to different stages of the process, revealing the history of the painting’s creation. Grosse works on several paintings simultaneously, explaining that “this already expands the format, not through the size of the individual works, but through the succession of ideas.” Thus, Katharina Grosse not only paints herself out of space, but also finds her way back into the stretcher frame. Ute Diehl

Estimation:€100,000

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