Modena, 19th September 2008 – 6th January 2009




Modena’s Palazzina dei Giardini as it has never been seen before: an explosion of colour, of energy and power, an architectural framework shown in an entirely new light, transformed by the artist to house her three-dimensional painting. An abstract theatre of experimentation, in which each and every detail is transformed by the hand of the painter.
Following in the footsteps of Ugo Rondinone, Yayoi Kusama, Adrian Paci, Katharina Fritsch and Heimo Zobernig, also Katharina Grosse has chosen the Galleria Civica di Modena to host her first solo exhibition in a public Italian museum space.
From her large format canvases, to objects like stones and balloons, to earth, to the walls, ceilings and floors: Katharina Grosse makes use of both old and new painting media. Of German origins, she is among the painters of the last generation who have gained greatest recognition on an international level.
After a long and intense work to be undertaken at the beginning of August and put together by Grosse herself especially for the exhibition space in the historical ducal hothouse, on Friday 19th September at 6.30pm at the Palazzina dei Giardini in corso Canalgrande, Modena, the exhibition “Un altro uomo che ha fatto sgocciolare il suo pennello” (“Another man who has dropped the paintbrush”) will be inaugurated. A tongue-in-cheek title, and one which alludes both to a technique and a specific pictorial movement – dripping – the most famous exponents of which include Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, and also to painting as a whole, long considered a male-dominated field.
Organised and produced by the Galleria Civica di Modena as well as by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, the exhibition is curated by Milovan Farronato together with Angela Vettese, and will open alongside the initiatives of the Festivalfilosofia, held in Modena from the 19th until the 21st September 2008, dedicated this year to the theme of Imagination.
Interested largely in the “How” side of painting – i.e. the gesture freed from the surrounding area of the canvas – Grosse carries out uninterrupted pictorial interventions: she works with an air compressor, allowing her in theory to apply an endless stroke, going beyond the use of the canvas as the sole support. The artist is constantly on the lookout for new materials, experimenting with the yield and potency of her colours and coming up with images that appear to be perpetually in movement.
Inside the Palazzina dei Giardini, a series of already painted canvases will be positioned and then repainted in loco. The painting will thus spill over onto the walls, floor and all the surrounding spaces. Then the artist will remove the canvas on which she has worked and move it to another area, thus leaving a negative trace of the work, with the positive on display in another room.
Within this abstract and entirely painted world, the visitor will be guided by the chromatic sensations found along the display path, set out to form a continuum: the images will follow one after another all through the rooms of the Palazzina in such a way that, rather than merely seeing what is before us in that moment, we will also be reminded of that which we have just seen.
“Katharina Grosse,” writes Milovan Farronato, “is an artist who takes over the exhibition space, at times highlighting and at other times departing from the architectural structure. Hers is an exploded painting which contemplates expression in terms of volume thus becoming a composite environment, the logic of which is defined in terms of ratios of scale, the coming together/clashing of the full and the void, negative and positive traces, yet never left to chance. It is an emancipated pictorial approach, the fruit of her continuous studio experimentation and an ongoing relationship with her own expressive medium.”
All Katharina Grosse’s works are site specific and withhold both a link to her preceding work, as well as an element which foretells of that which is soon to come. “Her work,” continues Farronato, “may be read as a saga within which every stage is both a project and a result… It is as if the artist were constantly on the heels of her own work, and as if it were also forever behind her.”
The exhibition, which will remain on display until 6th January 2009, will be accompanied by a catalogue published by König/Electa containing a wide range of images of the installations on show, along with critical texts by the curator Milovan Farronato as well as the head of the Galleria Civica di Modena, Angela Vettese.


Biographical Notes:

Katharina Grosse, (Freiburg, Germany 1961), lives and works between Düsseldorf and Berlin. A professor at the Kunsthochschule of Berlin, throughout her career she has held numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Europe and around the world.
Her solo exhibitions include: FRAC Auverge, Clermont-Ferrand, Renaissance Society, Chicago, and Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Porto (2007); Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston (2004), White Cube in London (2002).
She has also taken part in a great number of group shows held by important galleries and institutions, including: the Taipei Biennial (Taipei), the Museion of Bolzano, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006), the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2005), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Helsinki (2003), the Minibienal do Chile, Santiago de Chile, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the 25th San Paolo Biennial, San Paolo (Brazil) (2002), and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna (2000).

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Galleria Civica di Modena
c.so Canalgrande 103
41100 Modena - Italy
tel. +39 059 2032911/2032940
fax +39 059 2032932
www.galleriacivicadimodena.it

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