Exhibition catalogue: “Katharina Grosse. It Wasn’t Us”

09.09.2020
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart

For the exhibition “Katharina Grosse. It Wasn’t Us” the artist has transformed the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin as well as the outdoor space behind the building into an expansive painting which radically destabilises the existing order of the museum architecture. The exhibition catalogue documents the creation of the new site-responsive work “It Wasn’t Us” and contains a text by Katharina Grosse on painting as well as contributions from renowned authors from various disciplines, which offer new perspectives on the artist’s work.

Grosse’s large-scale paintings are multi-dimensional pictorial worlds in which walls, ceilings, objects, and even entire buildings and landscapes are coated with splendid colour. Katharina Grosse’s latest site painting disregards the boundaries of the museum in a grand gesture that extends into the public space behind the building.

On the occasion of the exhibition an extensive, interdisciplinary catalogue will be published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. Alongside an introduction by editors and exhibition curators Udo Kittelmann and Gabriele Knapstein the catalogue contains essays by social anthropologist Julia Eckert, theatre studies scholar Doris Kolesch, sociologist Martina Löw, curator Daniel Milnes und literary scholar Heather I. Sullivan. In collaboration with author Annika Reich, Katharina Grosse has prepared the text “Painting is an Imposition” especially for the publication. (German/English, hardback, 24 x 31 cm, 216 pages, 172 illustrations, 44 Euro, museum price 40 Euro)