161 In June 2024, during a visit to Katharina Grosse’s studio, I discover a series of objects that I remember most as being clumpy. Almost all of them are attached to a base made of rectangular cardboard, larger than A4 and smaller than A3 size, and they lie next to one another on long white tables, from which they curve, bulge, and buckle upwards. The works date from the years 1987 to 1990, when the artist was still a student. The artist says, “I was looking for ways to come into the space.” She says no more, because I have asked her to leave me alone with the objects. The objects on the white tables do not seek to capture the gaze of the beholders. The enticing thing about them is their unsightliness: subdued colours that appear old, like book jackets from the 1920s. In terms of materiality, often half opaque, waxen wax, waxen polyethylene that undulates as if it has become too hot, cast or painted with oil paint. “Everything screwed in the back,” the artist says, now arrived in the twenty- first century, she picks up one of the objects and turns it around, showing the screws: “Everyone used screws at that time.” There is something jagged or sticky about these works, an element of alchemy, fluids flow together that don’t want to belong together, a hilly landscape. Elsewhere, suddenly little colourful flat-top mountains emerge, like plinths for sculptures yet to be created. Plasticine and linseed oil, a hint of children’s room, a hint of model railway. Miniatures for landscape design on a distant planet, for a parallel universe. Paradoxically, what wants to and should expand in the space sometimes seems compacted and compressed: a great deal of will without liberation. Concentrated power, perhaps anger as well. Some of this perhaps attests to the absoluteness with which a young artist at the academy is working into the space. A space that was dominated in the art world by “wild” men that claim all greatness for themselves, as if it were a given. Interestingly, looking at pictures of the works later reveals that they are less clumpy than I remember. The clumpy works just stuck out in my memory, Plasticine crumpled into a fist. One phase in her oeuvre. “Then there’s a rupture at some point,” the artist says, leaving the sentence hanging in the air. I mark this rupture with a trip: this journey catapults me to the midst of a work by the artist that is being exhibited in northern France: Shifting the Stars at Centre Pompidou-Metz. It was originally developed for an exhibition in Sydney and is now being adapted for Metz. The installation is accessible, and it continues on the asphalt outside the museum’s windows, beyond its own horizon of fabric. This is not a work that wants to expand into the space, it is the space, so much so that once one is inside it, all notions of an exterior world are painted over by it. It consists of sheets, sewn together to form a gigantic structure that hangs from the ceiling, casts folds and embraces the room. The sheets were sprayed, pelted with paint. The paint-soaked material also covers the floor, and to experience the work, it’s impossible to avoid trampling on it. The whole thing is very, well, colourful. “Colourful” is perhaps the wrong word, that sounds like the nursery, like wrapping paper. All the same, no other word occurs to me. The colours are there. They do not fight one another, they do not push with their own interests to the foreground, the overall impression is balanced. The colours are present, but it’s not about them. But there are no coincidences, there is no indiscriminateness. If you ask the artist, she will be able to explain the choice of each individual colour, each colour combination. The “coincidental” aspect of the works by this artist – or rather, their “natural aspect,” one might almost say, when it’s about trickles of paint that result from spraying and drip down the fabric – thus probably results quite generally not from negligence of any kind. Coincidence is processed in a controlled fashion. In her early works I once saw pieces from the landscape of a model railway. Now, after getting to know Katharina
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