In 2014, the Grand State Prize for Visual Arts Baden-Württemberg will be awarded for the first time under the name Oskar Schlemmer Prize. The award goes to artists with a connection to the state who provide important impulses in contemporary art and is linked to a presentation.
The first recipient of the prize is the internationally renowned artist Katharina Grosse, who is presenting two new works at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
For Katharina Grosse, painting has no boundaries. After beginnings in the tradition of color field painting, she has been expanding color into space, architecture and landscape in her works for more than two decades, defying material-related barriers. In her painting, for example, she uses different color supports, such as floors and facades, balloons and piles of earth, fabric and objects, as well as canvases and paper for equally different forms of color application by brush, roller, or spray system. Her works do not follow any design principles of figure and ground, but are concerned with issues of perception and scale. Despite narrative exhibition titles, in which a longing for a world of imagination is echoed, they manage without symbols, references, and documents. Rather, Katharina Grosse allows color to expand as arbitrarily as possible, and in her assertion of elementary conditions the possibilities of painting seem all the more direct.
Katharina Grosse, born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the art academies of Münster and Düsseldorf. Since 2010, she has been a professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Previously, she taught at the Berlin Weißensee School of Art. Her work has received international attention and recognition in numerous group exhibitions and biennials, for example in São Paulo and Sydney, as well as in numerous solo exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Currently, the Public Art Fund is presenting her first outdoor sculpture in New York, in front of the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn. Works by Katharina Grosse are in public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf.
Currently, the Public Art Fund, New York, is presenting "Just Two of Us," her first outdoor sculpture in the U.S. in front of the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn, and the Mural Arts Program, Philadelphia, is realizing Katharina Grosse's largest painting in public space to date, "psychylustro."
In the summer, her works will also be on view at the Kunsthaus Graz and the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.