At some point I realized painting can bring everything together in a single moment.

(Katharina Grosse)

Gagosian is pleased to announce Pie sell, lee slip, eel lips, an exhibition of new paintings by Katharina Grosse at its gallery at Park & 75, New York. This exhibition follows Katharina Grosse: Studio paintings, 1988–2022: returns, revisions, inventions, a retrospective that originated at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in Saint Louis and traveled to the Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunstmuseum Bonn through September 2024.

Grosse uses a compressor-driven spray gun to apply industrial paints directly onto landscapes, architecture, objects, and panels. This tool extends her reach and accelerates her gestures, balancing impulsiveness with intent. In her studio outside Berlin, she produces works on canvas in a practice that is consistent with the spontaneous flow of her improvisational, performative process. Painting in the studio also permits her to develop works over a longer period than the institutional and organizational constraints of her in-situ projects generally allow.

In her studio paintings as much as in her environmental works, Grosse uses paint to claim territory at immersive scales, introducing new conceptions of color and space that disorient and reorient the viewer. To make them, she sprays paint onto unstretched canvases in a varied palette of vibrant primary and secondary hues, making use of chromatic and spatial juxtaposition. The propulsive, rhythmic marks traverse the paintings as tapering lines and whiplash curves that spiral back on themselves, capturing the trajectories of the artist’s full-body movements.

The exhibition’s title, Pie sell, lee slip, eel lips, breaks down the elements of language and reassembles them into idiosyncratic structures, like a revolving thought, repeated but anagrammatically, illogically reversed. Likewise, conventional relationships between figure and ground in these paintings are superseded by layered forms that appear to move with tumultuous fluidity over and under one another. Grosse intertwines and twists strands of color, creating spatial complexities that confuse a sequential reading. Confronting the viewer with immediately impactful compositions, the paintings also invite sustained attention to comprehend their pictorial entanglements.

Grosse’s expansive gestures extend over the paintings’ edges, alluding to spaces beyond the canvas; one senses that there is more than can be seen. This approach resonates with the speed, directness, and boundlessness that is central to Grosse’s practice, engaged as it is with the possibilities of abstraction in art, but also by diverse relationships with the external world, from prelingual thoughts to the visceral impact of music.