Canyon

Canyon, a new work by Katharina Grosse has been on public display from October 2022. This installation is the latest artist commission by the Fondation, and comes after works by Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly and Adrián Villar Rojas inspired by the architecture of the Frank Gehry building.

Composed of eight 5-millimeter-thick aluminum sheets “petals” spray-painted with acrylic and connected to a beam, Canyon is a response to the artist’s question: “How can a painting appear in a space with no floor and no walls, where air, light, flows and energies circulate?” It is a reference to the characteristics of the “canyon” (the name given to the void that is visible inside the building from the ground up.)

Echoing Frank Gehry’s glass facade - a ship moored to a cascade - the artist has hoisted a kind of cut-out sail using a pulley, in a tense exchange with the architecture. From the work’s conception, a close dialogue has been established between the artist and the architect - a passionate debate around the use of color in a pre-existing building.

Canyon is visible from the Fondation’s different landings. Featuring curves and counter-curves, the work defies gravity by combining elegance and monumentality in a kind of choreography with the building.

This commission is an extension of two new interventions by Katharina Grosse last spring: Splinter (2022), part of the “Color in Fugues” exhibition in Paris; and Apollo, Apollo (2022) in Venice, part of the Fondation’s “Hors les Murs” programme and the 59th Venice Biennale.

Canyon will be accessible with a ticket for the "Monet-Mitchell" exhibitions.

Hangs

Commissions

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Since the end of the 1990s, she has been renewing the pictorial medium by intervening directly on the architecture of the institutions that welcome her, making the spray gun her favourite tool. More recently she has developed her works further by painting on expansive drapes or printing photographic images on very large sheets of fabric in a mise en abîme of her practice.

Her works are notably present in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Pérez Museum, Miami, Florida – USA; the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; the Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, Germany; the Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; the MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italia. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include psychylustro for Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, Pennsylvania, USA (2014); yes no why later at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2015); Untitled Trumpet for the 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2015); Rockaway for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! programme in Fort Tilden, New York, USA (2016); Asphalt Air and Hair at ARoS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark (2017); This Drove My Mother Up the Wall at South London Gallery, United Kingdom (2017); The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped at Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia (2018); Wunderbild at National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic (2018/2019); Mumbling Mud at chi K11art museum in Shanghai, China (2018/2019) and at chi K11 art space in Guangzhou, China (2019); the two-person show Mural: Jackson Pollock I Katharina Grosse at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachussets (2019/2020), Is It You? at The Baltimore Museum of Art (2020/2021), It Wasn’t Us at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Germany (2020/2021) as well as Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us at HAM – Helsinki Art Museum (2021/2022) and Shutter Splinter at Helsinki Biennale, Finland (2021).

Katharina Grosse held professorships at Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000-09) and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010-18) in Germany. She has been selected as a jury member for the 2020-23 stipends at Villa Massimo, Rome, Casa Baldi, Olevano Romano; and since October 2021, she has been the Chairwoman of the board of KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Kunst-Werke Berlin), Germany.