IN CONVERSATION WITH KATHARINA GROSSE

Over a period of two years, Katharina Grosse and author Klaus Dermutz met
regularly in the artist’s Berlin studio for a series of focused, in-depth conversations.
The resulting volume, Katharina Grosse. In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz, brings
together ten extensive interviews that explore key themes in Grosse’s artistic
practice.

Katharina Grosse (*1961, Freiburg im Breisgau) held professorships at the
Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin (2000–09) and the Düsseldorf Art Academy
(2010–18). Most recently, the Albertina in Vienna presented her solo exhibition Why
Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle (2023–24), and the Centre Pompidou-Metz is
currently showing three large-scale in-situ works (Déplacer les étoiles, on view
through February 2025). Grosse lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand.

Katharina Grosse’s conversation partner, Klaus Dermutz (*1960, Judenburg), is an
author and publicist specializing in visual art and theater. Since 1990, he has
contributed to Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Theater heute, among others; from
2001 to 2009, he was co-editor of Edition Burgtheater.


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[...]

Do you understand the perforation of the pictorial field as a kind of iconoclasm? In your works there is a blasting apart of boundaries, a suspension of the more traditional image.

What do you mean by “the more traditional image”? There are other pictorial forms that are very close to me that have been cultivated over many centuries, such as the fresco or the sculptural objects that lead to architecture and have led to the invention of the mural, from the Baroque all the way back to rock painting. [...] That the image has managed a kind of independence of place, that is a pretty recent development, historically speaking. The pictorial field is transportable, can be moved from here to there. What interests me is prying open the painted image, incorporating other, diverse layers of an image. So, perforating the surface of a painting is not iconoclastic; rather, it grants me the possibility to re- evaluate the specificity of each context.

[...]

What influence does nature have on your artistic work?

My way of working has a lot to do with the weather. For example, when it’s humid and not so warm, the colors dry differently, mix with each other in a specific way. I’ve noticed how colors can be enveloped in colors, there are reds that can be painted over by a shade of blue and remain active in the blue but are no longer recognizable as red. There is a form 231of wrapping a color in another color, this can be done with three or four colors in a row. The colors have to be damp for that, after that I usually can’t work anymore, there’s too much running, the colors have to dry first. [...] Speed plays a very big role in this, otherwise I can’t pull off the sequence very well, it has to happen incredibly quickly and almost unstrategically.

[...]

You use cold colors.

Yes, the colors are cold and rather industrial. It’s very important to me that the colors, because of their coolness, are not overly prone to becoming attributes for some form of rendering. Other paint manufacturers have a dove blue light blue, for example, and that could be a color you see in advertising with a Mediterranean sky. That’s the kind of color I avoid.

Was it difficult to work with folds? Folds create spaces that are far away from you and absent of light.

Yes, exactly, there are places that are hard to reach. I didn’t walk around in it very much when I was painting (Katharina Grosse talks about her exhibition "Wer, ich? Wen, Du?" (Who, I? Whom, You?) at Kunsthaus Graz, 2014), I wanted the work to look pristine. What was special about the foam was that it absorbed a great deal of the paint, giving the paint a different tonality. I thought it was great to see the material change from the foam to the floor, where everything was razor sharp and non- porous. In the foamy structure, I had to figure out how the paint would mix, where it was coalescing, getting dusty, and how coherent the overall painting was as it moved across the folds. I also found the painting going over the heavily manipulated fabric very interesting. The construction of the structure is quite different from that of the painting going over it. I wanted to make this waywardness very clear and show that the locality of the painted, and that of the built, are different. The temporal dimensions of the two levels, as well as their speeds— of the painted and the constructed— are also different.

Folds play a major role in your work. In relation to the universe, one sometimes speaks of a folded universe; in a fold there is hidden yet another, a further space, in which yet another space opens up, without one being able to see this when looking from one space into the next.

In the folded space it is very palpable that a certain part remains hidden from view, and that even that which is planned to be viewed also produces something non- visible. Or thought of even further: it is inevitable that we co- produce something for which we are responsible, simply because we make it, even if we do not know it. And it is my task during the working process to accept this unknowing, not to brush it away in the sense that I didn’t mean it that way, and also not to say that it makes my work stronger if I don’t show it. Our perception of the intended is very small, and the fold is a crucial element of this reality. And at the same time, the fold is a point of reference for a lot of things that are crucial to painting. When I was making portraits, I thought, rather enviously, about the fact that the great 154portraits of the Virgin Mary were eight- tenths painted fabric, and the face only a small fraction of the painting.

[...]

Your works are not only about concealing or covering, but also, as the two authors name it in reference to Tintoretto’s painting, about lying in folds, pushing together, arching, bulging, and catching.

This movement into the folded and outward is also the movement of the painting hand. The tangling is almost a Mannerist metaphor for the scribble [...], the back and forth; it is the simplest form of repetition and deviation through subtle variation, more extended, more regular, then more irregular. A deviation from the regularity of the movement, whether the movement goes back and forth, [...]. These are the simplest forms; they always occur in movement.

[...]

You recently told us that Tintoretto is one of your favorite painters. What is it about Tintoretto’s painting that appeals to you so much?

In the beginning, what was important to me about Tintoretto was the sensation of the speed with which the image is created, how Tintoretto assembles the drawing and painting from different perspectives. His constellations culminate in a certain event of action, and it fascinates me that the critical situation in which the actors find themselves is also so endlessly connected to painting. [...]

One can also perceive an enormous speed in your work, a movement that also has to do with a rapid drama that is performed as if on a stage and that happens with an incredible force.

The force is very strong in Tintoretto’s work, it shoots in from the side, always with incredibly dramatic incisions or superimpositions of highly divergent scenographic spaces. So, to give just one example, from the roof you can look down on the scenery below, and at the back yet another space opens up— he staggers the spaces into each other in an incredible, almost crude form of painting. Tintoretto is not the only one who painted like this, which is why he is not the most important for me. Munch also has this beating on the canvas. The touch on the canvas establishes the picture as event and yet it is nevertheless a portrait, a painterly form for landscapes, trees, water, and clouds, which are in themselves also events, ones filled with great sensual clarity.

[...]

In Gregory Volk’s monograph, there is an old photo of you as a young person in the forest, where you are sitting on the ground, and behind you is a large white triangle stretched between two trees (1982, Lake Möhne).

I was about twenty at that time, and I was traveling with a group of people who were painting landscapes. I had already begun my studies, but had yet to paint outside. I built this structure between two big trees, a kind of triangle through the branches. I was doing some stuff with branches at the time, hanging them on the wall as big bundles, painting them white or blue, and just experimenting with them. I don’t know what drove me to do it.

This white triangle looks like an installation.

Yes, exactly! I hung a large piece of white paper between the trees and pulled it up, perhaps it was already intended as a canvas. I painted it and threw forest soil over the fresh paint in an attempt to create structures.

So that the traces could be seen on the paper?

The forest soil did stick to the white paper, but there was no planning behind the gesture, nor even a very clear idea of what I was doing or why. When I went to Lake Möhne, where this photo was taken, I knew that I was going to make an installation— this much I did know. I had taken influences from other first- year art students like myself who were trying to figure out what place meant for artistic work, and to what degree place could influence you. When I was very young, I got into painting by sitting in the landscape all day, taking in the light and looking at the trees. The first painting I did outside was of a willow tree. When I went back to Lake Möhne to paint outside, I gathered those initial impressions and took them into the painting, with greater strength and physicality.

An early teacher said to you after you painted an old tree on a piece of drawing paper: “But behind you, there is also another tree.”

This was the experience with the willow tree! I sat in a ditch for almost a day and painted the willow tree, no one came by and disturbed me. My teacher at the time had studied with Emil Schuhmacher, an Informel painter, and had the uncanny ability to approach the picture completely freely. He said to me: “The interesting thing is that everything can be in the picture, even the tree that is behind you or to your side.” I was really taken by this suggestion; I had never heard that the environment I did not perceive could also have an influence on my thinking.

[...]

Is it true that for you painting is like hearing someone sing?

More in a structural, analogous sense, that color can have a directness akin to that of the sound of a voice.

Are you particularly interested in the sound of the voice?

The directness that is possible through the voice, yes. I’m not primarily interested in text per se, but I’m attracted by the voice, its colorfulness, emotionality, its psychological reverberations. That’s also one of the reasons why color interests me so much. Color exerts a direct attraction. Before I know it, I am already engaged with it and looking. I don’t need an initial instruction to get into the work. I’m also interested in the volume that can be generated via raw color, this approaching- one- another, this aggressiveness in a non-hierarchical sense, the energy that arises from getting too close to it.


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All quotes are taken from

Katharina Grosse. In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz
published in July 2025 by Hatje Cantz


Portrait: Photographed by Hans Grosse

Blog post by Uwe Dreysel, 2025.07.25.