June 8, 2021 - January 23, 2022
Katharina Grosse
Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us
HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Finland
HAM’s southern hall is filled by a three-dimensional painting based on over a thousand metres of cloth tied into knots. The mountain of cloth falling into folds from the ceiling and spreading across the floor was painted by the artist on-site. The dozens of over- and interlapping tones form a vast painting that visitors can step into. With each step, the piece shows a different side of itself. The physical experience of the painting is affected by the observer’s own movement, changes in perspective and the presence of other people in the same space.
Occupying HAM’s northern hall, her second piece consists of a labyrinthine assembly of thin, silky fabrics hung from the ceiling and reaching all the way to the floor. Printed on the fabrics are photographs the artist took in her studios and her previous installations. The photographs show what is left behind by the painting process on walls or floors. They show paintings in the making and finished ones, adapted in scale to the galleries. They revisit the notions of invisible space, absent space and folded matter. The art and artist are gone, yet their presence lingers. The printed photographs move the originally spatial and temporary act of painting and its residue into a new space, where the colours shine as real
Photo:
KATHARINA GROSSE Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us, 2021, HAM Helsinki Art Museum; Photo: Hanna Kukorelli / HAM Helsinki Art Museum;
Courtesy of Gagosian, Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder and KÖNIG Galerie; Copyright: Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst-Bonn, 2021