Skyler Mitchell – Katharina Grosse – 3D Design

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany.  Most of her work consists of brightly painted acrylic structures/paintings. In her work, Katharina hopes to grab the attention of the audience through the color and shape rather than the meaning or idea itself. She wants the audience to become almost engulfed and overwhelmed by the color to the point of having their own ideas and their own thoughts. To have the audience, rather than try to guess what the artist is trying to say, create their own meaning to the piece to help them relate to it and value it.

The piece above offers a bit of an idea of what Katharina mainly produces. Taking 3D or 2D objects or spaces, and just completely covering it in intense bright and contrasting color.

In this piece, Katharina smothers a book in primarily yellow acrylic before heavily painting it with blue, green, and orange acrylic paints. As explained earlier, she takes an object and completely covers it with bright, loud colors completely.

The pieces above are 4 of many disk like circles she has created. Katharina seems to focus a lot on the shape of circles. I’ve noticed she has created a lot of pieces that consist of nothing but spheres and 2D circles like the ones above on canvases to buttons to disks that she hangs on the wall. I personally really like the small and simple pieces above.

The pieces above really define the kind of artist she is. To take a landscape or an object and completely envelope it with bright colors. I absolutely love color in my work, I’ve never been a huge fan of using graphite or ink for any of my pieces. I think the main reason why she caught my eye is because I almost felt a sense of excitement when I saw all these colors in one place. It gave me a sense of encouragement to get on my computer and start drawing again. I feel like color has a much stronger impact on a persons feelings about a piece. If you were to give somebody a picture of a rainbow in black and white, it would have the power to almost disappoint the person. Color has the ability to bring emotions, and I think Katharine is trying to just that with all of her pieces. She is trying to provoke emotions within her viewers.