Talk

Encounters: Artists, Cities, and Communities:
Through public commissions and site-responsive projects, the ways in which artists engage with the cities and sites they encounter continue to evolve alongside the communities and organizations that present their work. From citywide curatorial projects like Elmgreen & Dragset’s A Place Called Public in Munich, to Sam Durant’s investigation of historical narratives and their contemporary communities, and Katharina Grosse’s numerous site-specific outdoor commissions, considerations of place and people are always paramount to working in the public realm. The spring 2014 series of Public Art Fund Talks at The New School brings together a diverse group of artists to share the inspirations and practicalities involved in their varied approaches to the places and communities that become sites for public art.

Katharina Grosse has pushed the limits of painting to expand the traditional notion of the canvas in both form and content. Using a large nozzle spray paint gun, cranes, and scissor lifts, she has transformed building facades, urban landscapes, and domestic spaces with abstract and illusionistic layers of color and texture. From city center commissions to architectural interventions, her energetic large-scale public installations have focused on the artist’s desire to lend a sense of volume to paint, transforming each site into a vivid experience of color and depth for passersby and visitors alike. Grosse’s monumental New York debut, entitled Just Two of Us, is on view at Metrotech Commons in Downtown Brooklyn until September 2014.

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. In addition to her recent project with Public Art Fund, Grosse has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions like the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2012); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2011); and ARKEN Museum for Modern Kunst, Denmark (2009). Recent group exhibitions include The Indiscipline of Painting, Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom (2011); Embrace!, Denver Art Museum (2009); and Space as Medium, Miami Art Museum (2009). Grosse’s work has been commissioned by institutions across the globe, including Amsterdam’s de Appel Arts Center, Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center at UCLA in Los Angeles, and the Queensland Art Gallery, in Brisbane. Katharina Grosse is represented by Galerie Johann König, Berlin.

The Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.