Gregory Volk

This is the most comprehensive monograph to-date on the innovative abstract site-related installations of German artist Katharina Grosse (b.1961).Grosse’s daring move from the canvas into both architectural space and the landscape, with her signature colourful spray paintings, has resulted in a deeply compelling body of work. From a Toronto airport to a decrepit beach structure on the New York coast and the spaces of major museums worldwide, Grosse’s works present thorough, if often temporary, carnivalesque transformations of extant places and situations.Author Gregory Volk has known Katharina Grosse and written about her work since the very outset of her career, and has witnessed her journey from unique talent to radical visionary. As he suggests here, Grosse’s continually developing practice, simultaneously ungainly and exhilarating, bewildering and liberating, radically extends the possibilities for contemporary abstract painting.

The work originally conceived by the artist couple Hubbard / Birchler for the Swiss Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale re-constructs the life story of the American artist Flora Mayo. Mayo had a romantic relationship in the 1920s with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. While he is now one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, her work was de-stroyed, and her life forgotten. Hubbard / Birchler reanimate Mayo’s compelling biography from a feminist perspective, combining reconstruction and documentation to create a multilayered form of narrative. The catalogue, produced for the current exhibition at the Sammlung Goetz, elucidates the research the artists engaged in and documents the installa-tion in an impressive manner

This catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition Diana Al-Hadid, on view from February 9-May 5, 2013.