Robert Leonard interviews Katharina Grosse.
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Robert Leonard: You studied in Dusseldorf when Gerhard Richter was teaching there.
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Katharina Grosse: Richter was not interested in personal style. He chose to paint pre-existing images. His class focused on the photographic image as a subject for painting. It was a hugely influential idea but I couldn’t relate to it. In Dusseldorf, there were a diversity of teachers and approaches to painting. I was in another painting class. It was concerned with finding independence from a referential image. We talked very little and didn’t read theory. It was all about looking at things. I was also longing to make really vast uncontrolled movements with my body. I wanted to find a way to integrate these interests. I remember, as a child, looking at a Henri Matisse painting from the fauve period. I saw the thickly woven canvas through the dabs of paint at the same time as the image. It made me conscious of how he did it, how he broke the painting down to things like colour and line, paint and surface. It was only by breaking down my painting into individual elements that I began to understand what I was doing.
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You started off making your wall-painting installations with a paintbrush, then changed to a spraygun. It brought a big change in the look of the paintings, their logic, and their relationship to the architecture.
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It was a big shift. I realised I’d been approaching spaces less as a painter and more like a carpenter, because I was following the architectural set-up of the room. I was thinking, ‘the canvas has to be this big because the wall is this big’. Then I realised that by using a spraygun I could generate an illusionistic space that completely contradicted the architectural space. It was liberating. By then, I was also completely fed up with the paintbrush, which makes you move up and down, and, when you hit the joint where the ceiling meets the wall, you awkwardly fumble around to find a reason to make another movement. With the spraygun, I had increased mobility. The paint surface you get is different too. Air and paint leave the spraygun together and make tiny bubbles and flecks. I found that fascinating. When I started using the airbrush, I hadn’t anticipated all the things that would develop out of it. I just started and got intrigued. The first piece I did was heavily attacked, but it made a completely different use of the architecture and this made me go on. I still use the paintbrush a lot for studio painting, but I don’t use it for wall painting.
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Many of your wall paintings suggest atmospheres, mists, clouds, moody landscape spaces. Are you a romantic?
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I evoke a certain atmosphere, but, at the same time, show how I do it. I did a ceiling piece that was clearly taking up the theme of sunsets. But then, when you looked outside, through the window, you realised it had nothing to with the real phenomena of sunsets. I’m interested in that kind of artifice. I’m interested in what I call ‘romantic irony’, which is a mor analytic thing.
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‘Romantic’ and ‘irony’ seem like opposing terms.
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Sure, if you use the word ‘romantic’ in the general sense. But I mean it more in terms of German romanticism of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Unlike the English romantics, the German romantics valued humour and understood form as an open process. As an artist, you always have to use some sort of system to transport or communicate your ideas, and there’s always the risk that it can become formulaic. German romanticism resisted that kind of closure. I want to experience life as a project that has no defined, finished form.
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The wall paintings never go all around you. There’s always a lot of blank white wall. The painting might be down this end of the room or in that corner. They are like entities occupying the space, but not fully identifying with it.
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A wall painting needs a certain amount of space around it if it is going to be a read as an image. Some pieces are huge and yet the area of white wall is still greater than the area of the painting, but you would never think that. If I painted the whole room, it would completely enfold you, so you would not be able to tell the room apart from what I’d done to it. It would be like decor.
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In your work, there’s conceptual considerations (about painting and its conventions, about what painting consists of and how it is shown) but also intuitive painterly considerations. There’s a tension between those two things.
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That’s what I’m dealing with, exactly. I plan out the works in advance, but things change when I do them. Lately, I’ve been using a lot of prefabricated components. I have to make models and say ‘this has to be so big’ and ‘there will be this many of these’. It has to be like this so other people can contribute and get the whole thing going. But, once I start working, the actual painting part can turn the whole idea around.
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When I walk into one of your installations, I’m confronted with a dilemma about how to orient myself to the work physically—where to stand to view it from.
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That’s something I’m fascinated by. There is no one point of view from which the whole thing unfolds and makes itself clear to you, no one right way to look at it. Walking this way makes you feel that the other way could have been more interesting.
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That’s lost in the documentary photographs, because they presume a particular viewpoint. They turn the installation back into a picture.
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That’s a problem I have with photography. That’s why I’ve started to document the installations on video. But sometimes in photographs I can see things I can’t see when I am on site making the work. I get a completely different idea of the work from a photograph.
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Recently, I’ve seen a lot of photographs of you in white overalls with breathing apparatus making the work. How important is this image of you producing the work to the project?
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I don’t like it at all. It started with the catalogue for my 2004 Infinite Logic Conference show at Magasin III, Stockholm. The graphic designer was a photographer. He documented me making the work and used the photographs in the book. But I don’t think it tells you much. In the end, it always looks the same. Despite the fact that the thinking behind pieces might be radically different, there’s always this person in white overalls who looks like a car painter.
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That said, with Infinite Logic Conference, there is a suggestion that we have entered your studio, with one canvas leaning casually against the wall, and your bed and other stuff there in the space.
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Actually, that work developed out of a piece I made in 2004. I wanted to do a small piece, something that wouldn’t be shown to the public. I decided to spraypaint my bedroom in Dusseldorf. I thought I’d test how much I really liked my own belongings, because I’d always sprayed other people’s stuff, stuff that didn’t matter to me so much. There was my bed, my clothes, my books, my money, my CDs. Everything was painted over in the end. I wanted to know whether it would end up being anecdotal. I redid it for Magasin III, a very different space. The gallery I used had been a corn-storage area with tiny windows which seemed to have little relationship to its massive volume. The show before mine needed darkness, so they closed the windows and painted the walls dark blue. I decided to leave the blue but opened the windows. Rather than painting dark on white walls like usual, I painted light on dark. It was a big open space, and you could walk in and see everything at one glance. So, I wanted something small, detailed, and intriguing in there, so you could go close and have a look. That’s where the bed and my other stuff came in. There were small-scale elements operating within the bigger scale of the whole and I became very interested in the shift between the two. The piece was ambiguous. It looked like you were in a bedroom, but it was much too big, with huge canvases and tiny windows. You didn’t know where you were.
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The bed and the wall painting were on one side, facing off against two studio paintings. Were you breaking or emphasising a distinction between the studio work and the installation?
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I wanted to understand how I could incorporate studio paintings into an installation with wall painting. I had never before done a room where they were together. The studio paintings were huge. They were very different from the wall painting and from one another. They presented very different approaches for generating space: one was an unfocused grid, the other was spiraling lines. So, there in the space were three approaches to how we understand space, time, and distance in painting. The canvases also operated a little like the bed, being like pieces of furniture.
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Another spiraling-lines painting turned up in your installation Something Leadlight at Kunsthall Bergen in 2005. You painted over part of it. It was such a lovely painting and it was like you wrecked it. Was your gesture vandalistic?
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Vandalistic? I like the idea that these gestures are aggressive but I don’t want to destroy anything for the sake of it. I mean, there is always the overall idea of generating an image.
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You’ve also moved onto the floor in a big way. Painted walls and ceilings are one thing, painted floors something else. Viewers are walking on what they are looking at. They are right in it.
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I was installing things on the floor. I wanted to integrate them into the piece, so I needed to paint on the floor as well. With floors, you can only really see as far as three metres, then the floor painting dissolves into the light or the space. You have to move on the surface to be aware of what you’re seeing. Sometimes I would put circular masks on the floor when I was painting it, so circles of the original floor would be left like spotlights. People wondered if they could step on the circles, because they gave the sense of a completely different materiality. When there are different sorts of pictorial space integrated into the floor painting like that, it’s much more interesting to walk on.
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Why did you first bring earth into the gallery and paint on it? 
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The idea came to me all of a sudden. I’d used objects before, things you could count, like books, clothes, or pieces of furniture. You can say, ‘I have two pairs of trousers and three sets of sunglasses.’ I was looking for something I couldn’t count. The soil was atomised like the dots of the spray paint, so it was like particles on particles. I was also interested in making it a little more aggressive, so I started painting rocks, like in Taxi und Tour at Mark Muller Gallery, Zurich, in 2006. The rocks were like big spray dots.
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You made Mark Muller Gallery look like a bomb site full of rubble. And, in Holey Residue at De Appel, Amsterdam, in 2006, it was like Vesuvius had erupted and volcanic sludge had poured through the gallery. There was something ruinous or entropic about these works. It makes me think of Anselm Kiefer.
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While I don’t see my work as specifically related to Kiefer, he certainly makes the ruin his subject. I was really fascinated by a recent Kiefer anecdote. Apparently, after he moved out of his German studio, he had a big clean out. It generated a huge heap of stuff: dust, screws, bits of wood, maybe the odd sunflower, a little bit of lead here and there. It was all sold to a collector as a work and there was like a forty-page contract about what the collector could and couldn’t do with it, that he couldn’t sell bits from it and so on. I was really fascinated that Kiefer made his detritus into a work, but also that it became this entity to be preserved, that couldn’t fall apart any more. He stopped the process. At any rate, my works mostly disappear pretty fast. They are there for six weeks or two months and then they’re gone.
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Some of the work disappears during the show.
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Sure. People walk through the soil pieces and they deteriorate really fast. I’m increasingly interested in how forms change in ways I can’t control or predict.
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In your installation at Chicago’s Renaissance Society this year, you painted balloons. Some withered and popped.
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I was looking for something to paint on that was light and easily transported. It was only when I made tests in my studio that I realised they would lose air and pop. It looked interesting. I like the idea that the aging of the piece is visible during the time it is shown. I want to do away with the idea of the work as something finished, complete, and finite, while still maintaining the feel of what we call image.
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June 2007