KATHARINA GROSSE
THE BLUE ORANGE

VARA RESECENTRUM, VARA, SWEDEN
PERMANENT INSTALLATION SINCE 2012

Katharina Grosse has painted the building that houses the bus terminal and railway station in the town Vara in Western Sweden bright blue. A number of multi-colored curving tube-like shapes several meters long are dropped on the roof and appear to be crawling across it.
Its title THE BLUE ORANGE is a clue to the thought processes that lead the artist to paint the entire building blue. If you paint an orange blue, would you still perceive it as an orange? Can these two identities remain cohesive or do they preclude each other? Similarly, can a serious municipal building painted this blue-screen shade maintain its civic function in the face of its playful exterior? Can two such apparently contradictory aspects coexist or does one necessarily supercede the other?
© Images Katharina Grosse
© Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2022

FEATURED ARTIST

KATHARINA GROSSE
Katharina Grosse (b. 1961 in Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New Zealand. Grosse held professorships at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, Germany from 2000-2009 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany from 2010-2018. For more than twenty-five years, the artist Katharina Grosse has been internationally present in the art world. Her painting maintains a position outside the categories of representation and abstraction: it operates in reality and on reality. For her, painting can precipitate everywhere and anywhere – on any surface and any object that sprayed paint can reach.

Her recent institu...
Read more