K11 Art Foundation (KAF) and chi K11 art museum are delighted to present Mumbling Mud, internationally acclaimed German artist Katharina Grosse’s first solo exhibition in China. Using the spray gun as her primary painting tool, Grosse has applied variegated swaths of paint across the walls of exhibition spaces, her own bed, an entire house and its surroundings, and arranged objects such as piles of soil and tree trunks to create large-scale site-related paintings. She has thus been able to liberate the application of paint from its immediate connection to both the painter’s body and any predetermined surfaces of the Western painting tradition. With colour, she traverses the established borders between objects and architectural settings, and ultimately offers models for imagining reality in ways previously unconceived by semiotic conventions, hierarchies and social rules.

Divided into five zones at chi K11 art museum, Mumbling Mud leads visitors through an immersive, labyrinthine passage. Upon entering the first zone, they immediately find themselves surrounded by a constructed landscape made up of building materials and piles of soil, all covered with colourful paint. Spectators are invited to meander through the five zones by following the painterly traces that Grosse left when she worked her way through the museum. The amorphous, multicoloured forms and shapes sprayed across the varying structures and draping cloths installed at the museum may also create an experience of wandering on the peripheries of the familiar, inviting rumination into the quintessential strangeness of a metropolis that is ever-changing and impossible to be delineated in simple contours. 

 

 

The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped, 2018/Acrylic on fabric /1,000 x 4,600 x 1,500 cm
Photo: Zan Wimberley
© Katharina Grosse und VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018
Courtesy of Gagosian, commissioned by Carriageworks Sydney, Australia

 

 

The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped, 2018/Acrylic on fabric /1,000 x 4,600 x 1,500 cm
Photo: Zan Wimberley
© Katharina Grosse und VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018
Courtesy of Gagosian, commissioned by Carriageworks Sydney, Australia

 

 

Katharina Grosse (b.1961) is known for her use of the spray gun as her primary painting tool to create vast site-related painting installations in architectural settings.

She believes that “a painting can land anywhere: on an egg, in the crook of the arm, along a train platform, in snow and ice, or on the beach.” Gross has passed strongly coloured swaths of paint across the walls of exhibition rooms, her own bed, a public billboard, an entire house and its surroundings, and different kinds of arranged objects such as piles of soil and tree trunks. Using the spray gun, she has been able to liberate the application of paint from its immediate connection to both the painter’s body and any predetermined surface. It traverses the established borders of objects and architectural settings and creates a dissensual order of reality. Ultimately Grosse’s painting not only reworks the divisions that cut across the visible world and are responsible for its familiar shape, but also the fundamental division between the visible and the invisible. Disregarding established functions, attributions, and hierarchies, her painting turns into a prototype that prefigures options to organize our lives in novel ways. Mumbling Mud offers new interpretations of Grosse’s iconic artistic practice in the context of contemporary China.

 

 

Untitled Trumpet, 2015/Acrylic on wall, floor, and various objects /660 x 2,100 x 1,300 cm/All the World’s Futures, 56th Art Biennale, La Biennale di Venezia, Italy
Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Katharina Grosse, Nic Tenwiggenhorn and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018
Courtesy of Barbara Gross, Munich, Galerie nächst St. Stephan/ Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, KÖNIG Gallery and Mark Müller, Zurich

 

 

Double Floor Painting, 2004 /Acrylic on wall, floor, canvas, and on various objects /680 x 3,800 x 1,100 cm/Installation view at Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark
Photo: Torben Eskerod
© Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018

 

 

Double Floor Painting, 2004 /Acrylic on wall, floor, canvas, and on various objects /680 x 3,800 x 1,100 cm/Installation view at Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark
Photo: Torben Eskerod
© Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018

 

 

Double Floor Painting, 2004 /Acrylic on wall, floor, canvas, and on various objects /680 x 3,800 x 1,100 cm/Installation view at Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark
Photo: Torben Eskerod
© Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018

 

 

Das Bett, 2004/Acrylic on wall, floor, and various objects /280 x 450 x 400 cm/Düsseldorf, Germany
Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Katharina Grosse, Nic Tenwiggenhorn and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018

 

 

Rockaway, 2016 /Acrylic on wall, floor, and various objects /600 x 1,500 x 3,500 cm/MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York, USA
Photo: Pablo Enriquez
© Katharina Grosse und VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018
Courtesy of MoMA PS1, New York