Katharina Grosse’s works places heavy demands both on the conventions of painting and on the contemporary renunciation of said demands. This comprehensive book examines the differentiations performed by the works. In seventeen chapters, works taken from a period of twenty years encounter one another in ways only possible in the imagination and in books, removed from the strictures of chronology, genre boundaries and aesthetic categories. Every constellation of illustrations is at once intuitive and precise, convincing and ineluctable – insight into the work is complete and defines its various spheres of resonance. Ulrich Loock uses terms such as difference, vandalism and profane transcendence in a wide-ranging text that unfolds his thesis that Great Painting is an action performed on and in the world. The refusal of hierarchies, causalities and dialectics is instanced in the book’s design as executed by Berlin-based Heimann & Schwantes, in which the content flows both forwards and backwards.
