Katharina Grosse: Cloud in the Shape of a Sword

Katharina Grosse is widely considered one of the defining painters of her generation. Grosse’s multidimensional works cross both spatial and cognitive boundaries with their expansive gestures and enormous vitality. Her in situ paintings are often applied directly onto walls, staircases, trees, and other structures, and she is known for her use of a spray gun to create cloud-like effects.

Grosse’s colorful interventions have had a powerful influence on debates in contemporary art. As seen in recent solo exhibitions in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Helsinki Art Museum, Grosse’s expansive paintings celebrate the processual and the unfinished. The handsome publication, completed in direct cooperation with the artist and her studio, leads the reader through Grosse’s multidimensional work and illustrates the broad creative spectrum of this exceptional artist’s oeuvre through the most recent examples of her in situ praxis.