Ragona’s short review essay and interview with the groundbreaking German artist is now highlighted in Art Papers’ “From the Archives” series.
Art Papers has selected Professor Cash Ragona’s essay and interview Katharina Grosse: Lush Irreverence as part of its “From the Archives” series, preserving this compelling piece online for ongoing readership. Originally published in Art Papers Volume 32, Issue 05, Ragona’s conversation with Grosse delves into the artist’s provocative use of industrial spray painting to challenge traditional notions of scale, space, and materiality in contemporary art.
In the essay, Ragona reflects on Grosse’s disruptive approach:
“Katharina Grosse arrived on the international scene when she first picked up an industrial spray gun in 1998 in the project room at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. Vulgar, immediate, immersive—Grosse’s color-saturated installations defy scale and volume, architectural decorum and gallery manners, frame and brush. By the mid-1990s, her work was already beginning to move off the canvas, onto the wall, and out of the gallery. Grosse’s work spatializes, rather than localizes, visual vocabularies. In this, it recalls the effect that sound has upon us when we walk into a room. In addition, her work avoids reducing affect to an artificial spectacle of abstraction. Instead, it uses affect as a cool tool that can turn, at once, hot and cold. Her first experiments with spraying her own bedroom signaled the beginning of her use of objects in aggressively performative ways—personal items such as her bed, her computer, her desk, and her clothes were soaked with acrylic. Since then, nothing is spared: she treats books, undergarments, and piles of soil with equal valence, and equal disdain for their cultural value. Even when she seems dangerously close to a romance with color, architecture or design, Grosse flips the conceptual game so that her projects exhibit a razor-sharp awareness of their possible aestheticizing effects.”
Read the full essay and interview here.
Image: One Floor Up More Highly (2010-2012) Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA)