Degree Critical - Art Review - March 14, 2017
German painter Katharina Grosse has become renowned for her physical painting techniques. Using an industrial spray paint gun (and occasionally a hydraulic lift), she confronts all manner of objects with sizzling color. In her 2015 site-specific installation at the Venice Bienniale, Untitled Trumpet, undulating swaths of fabric were draped up and down walls and across the floor on which were heaped mounds of dirt and gravel, along with abstract Styrofoam resembling large hunks of driftwood. All of this—cloth, rocks, Polystyrene—was then spray-painted a dazzling rainbow of colors. Rockaway! (2016), her project in a condemned aquatics building at Fort Tilden Beach, transformed the abandoned shack into a spray-painted phantasmagoria suggesting the colors of sunset, and was a hit with Brooklyn beachgoers last summer.