The following interview took place in Houston on September 12, 2004 between 
Katharina Grosse and Lynn M. Herbert, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts 
Museum Houston. 


Lynn M. Herbert: You’ve really staked a claim so to speak in the realm of 
painting. Has it always been painting for you? 


Katharina Grosse: It became clearer to me during my studies that I needed 
something that was very immediate, where the result was visible right away, 
whereas in sculpture, printing or photography (with the development process), 
or video, you need extra tools to make your work visible. I was so much 
faster with painting and to split time and movement, and the relationship of 
time, movement and space into smaller units was easier for me in painting. 


LMH: Did you always have the sense that there was a lot of potential 
in painting? You seem to continuously expand the boundaries of painting. 


KG: Yes, I think so. I can remember that when I was a little kid, I would 
always expand the space on which I painted. I would paint on walls or I 
would take sheets from a pad of paper and put 10 or 12 together to make 
a big space and put it on the wall and play music in front of it … I would 
always expand from one activity to another, but it was always linked to some 
kind of painting activity. 


LMH: With regard to the different supports that you work with – paper, 
canvas, and architecture – does the work you do with one influence the work 
you do with another? Is there a dialogue between them? 


KG: At the beginning, there was this simple impulse to paint on whatever 
I could get hold but later, as I got more and more into the different media 
I used to paint on, I understood that the potential of painting was actually 
in stating its independence from the different supports that on the other 
hand define specific conditions in terms of space and time. 


LMH: What about color? Have you always been this comfortable with color? 


KG: Yes, I’ve always been completely attracted by color. I can remember 
that as a kid I always loved the most colorful clothes. Always. I can’t 
remember it ever being something I had to decide about; I would just go for 
it and live with it. 


LMH: Could you take me step by step through the process of doing a site-
specific work such as the one you’ve done here? Assuming that it begins with 
the site visit, how does your thinking evolve from there? 


KG: It is always a mixture of different kinds of information that interweave. 
The previous work has usually left me unsatisfied in a funny way. So 
you want to resolve things in the next one. Then you go and see the space 
and sometimes you discover that the project you were nourishing in your mind 
you can’t do there. When I came to Houston I saw that the highest potential 
with regard to surface was the floor. Through the site visit it is easier to 
understand everything together, the light situation, where to paint or to move. 


LMH: With regard to your palette, you gave us a list of the different 
colors that you wanted us to order for you. How site-specific is your color 
choice or do you want to bring in a broad palette from which to work once 
you get started? I’m thinking of the all-green work that you did at Kunsthalle 
Bern say vs. the many other works that have had a broad range of colors. 



KG: In Bern I chose the green to artificially answer the greenish light 
that came thru the windows. My intention was to minimize upcoming associations. 
To a certain extent I was working with preconceived ideas. Today I 
leave most of the decisions to the moment when I start working on site. When 
ordering for Houston beforehand I looked at the color chart and I just 
decided at that minute for a certain set of colors. 


LMH: Could you talk about the paint that you’ve come to use for these 
projects? 


KG: Yes, the Golden acrylic. When I started spraying I used oil paint, 
but it was very difficult to work with and unhealthy too. But I wanted something 
that was very close to oil in pigment density, and I needed colors 
that are very brilliant. When you overlay color over color, acrylic tends 
to turn grayish. Spray painting is a little vulgar and to do it with this 
really saturated high quality product gives it an irritating twist. 


LMH: How did you come to use the spray gun for painting? 


KG: There was a moment when in my brushed wall painting I thought that I 
was following too exactly the set up of the architectural space. I felt more 
like a sculptor than a painter, and I wondered whether painting could make 
a completely different use of space than a sculpture does. If I wanted to 
expand the space with painting, I had to move beyond the architectural setup. 
When going to see this little project space in Kunsthalle Bern, I looked 
up in the right corner and I thought: there should be a painting in this 
corner. The only way to move easily over difficult architectural crossings 
is the spray gun. I made a test in an old building and did the piece in Bern 
which was just one color, which was a green that from different angles could 
look like a dark red, or a dark blue, or even a black. And as it got a little 
less opaque it looked like a bottle green; it was a very ambiguous 
color. Rather than being a monochrome surface, it was a polychrome surface 
to my eyes. And then, after a little while, I began using a range of different 
colors with all different sorts of movement. I was getting away from 
this idea that I have to exclude things other people could see. 


LMH: How do you start a painting like the one you did here? What is it 
like when you begin? 


KG: I’m doing a floor piece here so the actual working process is very 
tricky because you are in your own way as you are in the painting with your 
body constantly. Yet at the same time wearing the mask, the goggles, and 
the suit excludes you from the space, so this idea of being in the process 
is an illusion. You’re in the minimum space yourself in this suit, and you 
have this spray gun, and out of yourself everything is being painted so 
you’re in a funny way confronted with your own activity. 


LMH: You mentioned that you enjoy the beginning. 


KG: Yes, it is great; you just go. The first 20 minutes is always fantastic 
because you see right away how it transforms the space. 


LMH: And as you get further into a site-specific painting does it become 
more difficult? 


KG: It’s always about where do I expend the smallest amount of energy to 
get the most out of it. This is the point that I want to reach. So the further 
I get, the less decisions are left to be taken. 


LMH: You used to do studies or models but you don’t do them anymore? 



KG: I did them during the first years. Back then I needed to decide how 
big the piece should be or where it should sit and I would even decide things 
like what colors I was going to use. Later on I realized I was preconceiving 
so many solutions before actually being in the space that my working process 
sometimes ended up aiming at an imitation of the anticipated result. 


LMH: What is the difference for you between working with a spray gun and 
a paint brush? Does the spray gun allow you to be more intuitive? Is it a 
very different experience for you using the spray gun? 


KG: Yes it is very different. When I was using the paint brush I was very 
much dealing with the idea of doing the simplest movements with the simplest 
tools to get a very complex structure. That was what fascinated me. I could 
just do linear movements. I could never go and all of a sudden interfere at 
some moment. I always had to take up some kind of outside movement and bring 
it into the painting and then cover a certain surface. This was restricting 
me to the point where I thought I would love to be able to go and do a dot 
again. And when I did the spray painting, all of a sudden I saw that the spray 
gun would offer me the possibility of putting together a surface out of dots. 


LMH: Do the paints mix at all? When you change from one color to another? 


KG: Very little in the gun itself, but the dots mix on the surface in the 
most fascinating ways. 


LMH: In the realm of site-specificity, your work raises interesting questions 
about space. There’s the space on which you’ve painted, there’s our 
sense of the architectural space, but as we interact with your work the volume 
of the space is activated in a way. Are you thinking about all of these 
three when you’re working or are you thinking more of the surface you’re 
painting on. 


KG: When I’m painting I’m not really thinking about it because I take it 
for granted that it does happen that way. Color has this amazing ability 
that once exposed and exaggerated, it has this power of energizing the space 
in many many ways. So it’s not only the idea of transforming say a concrete 
floor, it’s also that it dematerializes the different items that are in the 
space, and it irritates the notion of relations of wall to wall, say, in a 
corner or wall to ceiling and you might feel like it looks like there’s no 
corner any more. It is the coming together of an architecturally built space 
and a painted space which is an illusionistic space, and these two conceptions 
have nothing in common but they coincide, and that is the irritating 
moment. And then you yourself are moving as well, with your eyes and body 
moving in different ways. But when you stand or rest for a moment, you move 
your eyes and do the same movements that I must have done with my arms with 
the spray gun so you’re kind of put in a situation that I went through and 
this shifts you from your existence into mine, from the past into the present. 
This is an example of how the vitalization of the space works. 


LMH: You’ve mentioned before that seeing Renaissance frescoes in Italy 
influenced you in a way when you began painting on walls. Have there been 
any influences in terms of painting on the floor? Does the influence of 
those works carry over to the floor? 


KG: Yes, it was amazing when I was living in Florence to see all of these 
buildings that were thought through from the smallest stone on the floor to 
a little carving on the ceiling. 



LMH: In thinking about the large floor piece that you recently did in 
Denmark, what was it like spraying downward? You’ve mentioned that it’s 
technically different. Do you find that it is formally different as well? 


KG: In the Denmark painting there is a very strong relationship between 
the floor and the walls with integrated paintings and objects, whereas here 
in Houston you walk down those stairs and look at a painting on the floor. 
The material of the stairs and the floor is the same, so you’re actually 
already in the painting when you’re walking down the stairs and you’re looking 
at something that could also be the ceiling or the wall. This feeling 
of what you’re looking at is really transformed when you come down those 
stairs. 


LMH: Thinking about your using a spraygun, and that the paint becomes 
in a sense an aerosol gas with pigment in it makes me think of things like 
mist, clouds, fog – gasses that are found in nature. And those are things 
that we think of as being all around us or above us. I’m wondering about 
this piece that will be on the floor. As you come down the stairs are you 
going to feel like you’re in it? Like you’re floating? Or will it feel more 
like water below you? 


KG: When you were walking on the painting in Denmark which was really 
huge, you could only see really well the bits close to you. The connotation 
of surface is constantly condensed and as you walk on it, it unfolds. As you 
look back to where you were standing just two minutes ago, this is gone. So 
where you were and where you’re going to be are locations that disappear the 
moment that you leave them. Here in Houston the floor is cast in concrete; 
it´s actually the first time I´ll paint on an uncoated surface. The visitors 
will experience walking on a floor and on a painting at the same time. 


LMH: Could you talk a little about the objects you’ve incorporated in 
your site-specific works? 


KG: One day I decided to paint something private. So I painted my bedroom 
the way I had left it. There were loads of clothes, discs, cd’s and books 
and my bed of course and everything got sprayed. In combination with these 
objects my painting seemed even more independent from the coherent experience 
of volume and space in the architectural sense: the added layers of 
paint split the mutual relation of objects and their surface thus interrupting 
their narrative structure. 


When working with really big spaces I started to kind of rebuild the bedclothes-
book-situation I had at home to implement some entity of another 
scale. 


LMH: And the performative aspect of your work? You’ve mentioned before 
that painting with a spray gun allows you to artificially enlarge your body, 
that that’s one of the tricks it allows for. 


KG: This possibility of being really big, this illusion that you generate, 
that’s why it’s kind of a private performance. People only see the 
result and that’s what irritates them. They don’t see me. So this is the 
trick in a way, that I’ve disappeared. When you see something on the floor 
you wonder who built this, was somebody here? You’re confronted with the 
residue of an existence. 


LMH: There’s something very musical about the work. As if it is moving 
like music does, building up to a crescendo here and maybe a quieter passage 
there. And I’m thinking about how our feet will be coming in contact with it 



here on the floor. Did people comment about that with the floor piece in 
Denmark? 


KG: Yes, they were going to have a waltz class on the last day which I 
think is really nice. But I had a very strong feeling at the opening when 
there were a lot of people that I really wanted them to be in the painting, 
and have a group photo taken. I have a feeling that the volume of material 
is really good in connection with the work and becomes even more so with 
a floor painting. You have something on the floor and all these movements 
and different colors, but what puts them there is movement that is somewhere 
in the space. The information that you get from what you see makes you think 
subconsciously that something must have taken place that involved movement 
in the volume of the space, flying around or whatever, and it’s so big and 
vast that sometimes you think it must have been a very large person with 
a very little pencil doing this. You have this kind of shift of big and 
small, and you experience it yourself. 


LMH: You’ve spoken about transcendent nature of working this way. Being 
between a conscious and subconscious level. 


KG: I don’t really know what I do consciously or unconsciously. To transcend 
is a fascinating idea. I don’t know if I understand it the way culturally 
it normally would be, but if I ask a question on a certain level, I’m 
likely to answer it on the same level. I’ve got to shift and get another way 
to look at it to get to the next step, and so on, and so on. This constant 
process naturally drives you to somewhere completely different from where 
you started. This idea of constantly being in a different status, looking 
about and asking questions, that’s what I find fascinating, and you find 
that in old Indian tales in which mythical heroes can becomeany form – lake, 
sand, trees. 


LMH: One author has described your work as „torrents of color“. How would 
you characterize your gestures in painting? 


KG: Everything is a gesture – everything you do. If I lift my hand or if 
I smile, right? And there are easy ways to move your arm in the air. You 
watch what happens as the paint hits the wall and mixes with the paint that 
is underneath, and if you become intrigued, you stay longer; and you don’t 
move so much and all of a sudden the paint looks a different way. It also 
has to do with the color that I choose. It is interesting to really be able 
to tell one movement from another, so this is why I’ll use yellow say before 
a turquoise. I use different colors because it helps to retrace where the 
movements are. It’s not so much a decision of will it look good if I take 
this, but what will be most visible in relationship to what I’ve done 
before. 


LMH: Are you moving fast or slow? 


KG: I move fast. When people take photos or there is a film crew, they 
see that it is very much like a performance. 


LMH: You’ve mentioned that you want your work to greet people. How important 
is that generosity and welcoming aspect of your work? 


KG: I think it’s very important. It’s a funny way of being aggressive, 
but also a way of getting close to things. Using paint in such a generous 
way is also, in a sense, absurd. It’s overdone. And I think that’s a fantastic 
artistic strategy, to over do. It’s one of the simplest and most basic 
„tricks“ as you called it, to overdo notions. 



LMH: There’s a wonderful exuberant, over-the-top quality to your work 


with all its intense and varied color, a seeming uncontrollability as if the 
colors and gestures take on a life of their own. A kind of anarchy, as if 
you’ve liberated painting and you’re taking it out for a ride. 


KG: And I think it should be even more so. What is composition? Maybe it 
is the idea of making sense somehow, the idea of being readable to people. 
I think that is important. It’s not just about being a big, beautiful, sensual 
experience. It does talk about a lot of other things. Like anarchy and 
doing things you’re not supposed to in a funny and amusing way. What you 
would love to do as a kid: take the felt pen and paint the most beautiful 
furniture your parents have. I’m allowed to do what I’m doing, but at the 
same time, it’s playing with this idea of being too big. It’s about rules. 
It’s about being intellectual and all these discussions about the conceptual 
or about being too beautiful. Or about the ability to not preconceive a 
work, but the ability of doing exactly what you do while you’re doing it. 


The publication has been prepared in 
conjunction with Perspectives 143: 
Katharina Grosse, organized by Lynn M. 
Herbert, Senior Curator for the 
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. 


© 2004 Contemporary Arts Museum Houston