The Artist Who Paints Whole Rooms With a Spray Gun Wants to Challenge Every Rule We Take for Granted

What she sets out to unsettle is not only how viewers define painting, or how painting relates to space, but every definition and rule we take for granted.

What is painting? As contemporary art moves toward ever more varied materials, forms and ideas, can so old a medium be defined again?

The German artist Katharina Grosse's Shanghai show, "Mumbling Mud," sets out to give viewers a different way of looking.

"Mumbling Mud" is made up of five large works that divide the 1,500 square meters of the chi K11 Art Museum into five zones. Almost all of the work in each zone was made and finished on site. From the first idea, the whole process took about a year; installing it in Shanghai took three weeks. In the order visitors meet them, the five works are Underground, Ghost, Silk Studio, In the Belly and Showroom.

Underground is the first work you walk into. It is built from mounds of earth and construction material picked up in local Shanghai markets, and visitors can walk through the structure of soil, steel wire, cabinets, hollow cylinders and crushed stone by more than one route. The sprayed paint that covers the materials ignores the edges of the objects; what it summons is a kind of primal mess, or a landscape after the end of the world, a little like walking through building rubble — except that the color makes the rubble feel like something else entirely. It is called Underground because the chi K11 Art Museum sits next to a subway entrance, on a basement floor of the mall.

Ghost is a large, intricately shaped sculpture in styrofoam, which the artist cut on site with a hot-wire cutter. Walk around it and you still cannot assemble it into a whole in your mind.

Silk Studio is a pair of huge silk curtains hung along both sides of the hall, printed with the walls of Grosse's Berlin studio — a panorama of the room where she works with the spray gun — together with images of the other spaces she uses to make her oversized and sculptural pieces. These zones, Grosse says, show the different conditions under which a painting becomes real. "How does a painting turn up in our lives? The different ways it can be realized are not the same: you have to jump across that gap." The images carry traces of what once existed somewhere else, and what they may be reaching for is a connection across time.

In the Belly is exactly what its name says. Visitors enter a space made of hundreds of meters of fabric hanging in folds from the museum ceiling. It is something like a maze, though of course it has more than one way out. The folds fall unevenly through the work, like the wall of a stomach, and a person inside is a person inside a gut; painting here becomes a condition that wraps around the viewer. Standing among these deeply saturated folds of color, you are no longer looking at a two-dimensional "surface on a wall."

The last work, Showroom, is a set of interior furnishings sprayed with paint; as the final piece it points back at the shopping-and-art complex that houses the show. By "remaking" the furniture with paint, it ruins the expensive objects that are built to make you want them. Showroom looks at the rise of the "ideal home" and the show flat in China, and at what people chase when they buy.

Katharina Grosse was born in Germany in 1961 and has used the spray gun as her main painting tool since 1998. She is known for large three-dimensional works in bright, unmixed, sprayed color, and for pushing at what painting as a medium can do by taking it off the canvas.

Her painting is not confined to canvas. It has landed on eggs, a railway platform, whole houses, heaps of sand, the plants along a roadside, a beach. She has crossed the boundary of what a painting sits on, and changed how paint is applied, replacing the hand's stroke with the wide sweep of the gun. "I think a painting can appear anywhere; it is not tied to any one setting. It can also be a projection of, and a response to, architecture or sculpture, and the viewer can look at it from outside."

But her painting is not graffiti, she says. "Graffiti usually makes a demand by writing or drawing — marking a boundary, for example. What I do is paint the boundary out. I pull space open instead of closing it."

Grosse says she likes the collision between material and color. "I spray it onto a material, and the material is rough and sharp, so it fights with the color. At the same point there is a contradiction. That uncomfortable, irritated feeling is a jolt to the body's senses."

Most of her works are tied to a particular venue, and more than half of them are taken apart once the show ends. For Grosse the works "live in thinking and speaking"; their disappearance is written into them from the day they are made.

In 2016 she made Rockaway! for MoMA PS1's Rockaway! project in New York, a surrealist reworking of a building wrecked by a hurricane. The work is brightly colored and folds into its surroundings; the paint bleeds into the seaside landscape around it. Rockaway! is a biennial series of outdoor art installations that the Museum of Modern Art launched in response to Hurricane Sandy.

Painting at this scale asks more of the artist's body. Video footage shows Grosse kitted out in a mask, painting inside a large room. "The spray gun extends how far my body reaches into space, and it makes the whole process of painting more alive." By widening her range and her movements she hopes "to spark a different experience of knowledge." Ulrich Loock, who has worked with her for years, says that "Katharina opens the door of our imagination and confronts what we think we know about the world."

Her use of color is bold and abundant. She tries to leave color unrestrained and to use it to rub out the boundaries between objects — "that is the power color has to make us think." In the video Painting With Color, she describes the relationship between painting and color like this: "From the seventeenth century on, the art academies in Paris and elsewhere treated color as the feminine element of painting: unstable, unclear, hard to grasp. Whereas the idea of painting — line, drawing — was the more masculine part of art, clear, thought-through, easy to understand. I think I am playing with that tradition in an interesting way, because color is a very important spatial quality in my work. It is bound up with the solid, physical world of things, and that is part of my painting in space."

Conceptually, what the artist sets out to unsettle is not only how viewers define painting, or how painting relates to space, but every definition and rule we take for granted.

Her Shanghai show is called "Mumbling Mud." Both "mumbling" and "mud" describe a state in between. Ulrich Loock says the title is not a description but a way of "pointing out that the works do not have to be clearly defined." Liu Xiuyi, artistic director of KAF, says the name came from the Cantonese expression "a ghost eating mud," which describes speech so unclear that you are somewhere between hearing it and not.

Grosse first came to Shanghai in 1981, when she stayed for a while with her father. A two-person show planned then with the painter Ding Yi fell through for various reasons. More than 30 years later, her first exhibition in China opens on November 10 at the chi K11 Art Museum in Shanghai.

On November 5, Katharina Grosse sat down for a conversation at the chi K11 Art Museum with the following people.

K: Katharina Grosse

Liu: Liu Xiuyi, artistic director of the K11 Art Foundation (KAF) and curator of "Mumbling Mud"

Zheng: Zheng Guogu, artist

Cui: Cui Jie, contemporary Chinese artist

U: Ulrich Loock, independent curator, critic and lecturer, who has worked with Katharina Grosse on several projects since 2007

On the connection between space, time and place

K: My work goes back more than 20 years, and this time everything was made here in Shanghai. I would like to hear what fellow artists think about the connection between space, time and place.

Zheng: You could call her the queen of the spray gun. She uses it to change a space and its environment; she works with it.

Cui: I had seen Katharina's work in pictures, but never in person. Having just walked through the show, my first thought was how different it is in the room. I work mainly as a painter, and I have always paid attention to the relationship between painting and space, so I am interested in how you can put space and the language of painting together into a new kind of experience. There are details here you cannot get from photographs. In the last work, Showroom, I noticed a shoe print on the carpet beside the sofa. K11 told me a pair of shoes had been there earlier and was taken away, leaving the print. It made me think that on top of painting and space, there is another layer here — time.

Liu: The work is very natural, very self-directed. The shoe print is part of the domestic setting; it is deliberate. Without the wide view of how it was made, you may only understand a work in pieces. I want to ask Katharina: how do you work?

K: Texture and painting, or texture and color, matter a great deal to me. We talk about painting and color as two things, but in German, painting and coloring are the same word. Painting is an act of the body; color belongs to the imagination. The relationship between the painted image and the body is central to my work. Many of our images come out of color in flux. An image made that way sets off all kinds of sensory links and experiences. Once we step over that threshold, the experience is completely different — and to make it real you have to walk it with your body. That has to do with the several layers of this show, which is split into five zones, with work on the ground as well as pieces hung from above.

Zheng: Let me offer a comparison, for anyone interested in space and environment. When I face a space, I ask which magnetic fields interfere with the human body, and I take away the part that makes the body uncomfortable. I want people to walk into a space with no magnetic interference. When the interference is zero, it feels good. Katharina works with many colors: white has to do with energy, red may stir your sensitivity, and all of these colors move the body. The points where your inner energy gathers are in fact connected to the color and space outside you.

Cui: I mostly paint buildings. Architecture has always been closely tied to music. As a painter you have to keep asking what is the most you can give someone through a flat surface, so I wondered whether sound or smell could reach the people looking at my paintings. Back then I would turn the feel of canvas into the feel of metal, because metal carries memories of hearing, touch and smell too.

Walking through Katharina's show just now, I could sense sound, even though there was none. You see the different colors and rhythms in the room and imagine how a body would move through them. I could even sense a smell; as the body moves in the field, all of it weaves together into something like music. As for the layers of paint on the canvas — look at one point instead of the whole and you feel there is a hole behind it. You wonder whether there is green under the red, and whether under the last layer there is nothing at all.

What I choose is to face and question my own imagination

Liu: Many reporters have asked Katharina how she picks her colors. She says the choice is natural — she does not lay them down one color at a time, they come out as a band, a family. How do different senses and different ideas come together?

K: I see the relationship between painting and life as a rhythm, a method that lets us weigh different options. What I choose is to face and question my own imagination — to see how many possibilities there are, how space is defined, and then to challenge that definition. The space of a painting is hard to define or measure. We paint with color, we define with color, and it is different every time. Yellow and blue can be combined endlessly, and each combination sets off a different bodily response. That unpredictability is for our senses to feel.

Our bodily feeling and our intelligence are a way of measuring what is real; we keep probing for the truth through the senses. My choice of a color is not improvised either — it is what I feel at that moment. And the basis on which I choose changes from day to day.

My field is very open. Everything inside it is at work, and I think everyone I have met leaves a mark on me and on the system.

U: To take it a step further: what strikes me is the wholeness, the overall sensory experience that Zheng and Liu described. I can feel it completely. From another angle, painting like this questions the definitions we start with. In this hall, if I want to identify things — the shelves, the plants, the chairs — I see a great many. But these paintings cut across all of it; this painting does not obey our definitions and ideas about objects at all. Katharina opens the door of our imagination and confronts what we think we know about the world; that knowledge is challenged. Through painting I redefine what is possible, because to my mind we are under no obligation to accept received definitions and rules. We should learn them and understand them, but in the end we do not have to accept what someone else has defined. That is what makes this such a good example: it opens a door onto possibility. I now have more options, and as a viewer I have the freedom to use them.

Not following the definitions we agree on — that is what "mumbling" means

Liu: In the five zones of this show you often forget where you are. That is possibility. This is her exhibition about space, her own experience of it. We study her floor plan every day, and even we sometimes get lost inside it. Not being defined, not defining, not following the definitions everyone has agreed on — that is what "mumbling" means. Mumbling is making the motions of speech without saying anything.

Katharina came to China back in the 1980s, but the exhibition planned then never happened. It took 30 years for one to happen. Our exchanges are mumbling and continuous too — a blurred state that cannot be fully pinned down.

Shanghai is a place where cultures collect. To me it is an interesting platform, an opportunity to see how different things coexist and mix. "Mumbling Mud" is still a bit of a mouthful in Chinese. What do you make of the title? How does it feel to you?

Zheng: What puzzles me is not possibility or indeterminacy. It is how to appreciate something foreign. Years ago there was an Eastern standard, and today it is out of date; now a Western standard has been added. But I think both will go out of date. There may be a Northern standard next. The artists who survive in history are, to put it in today's words, the ones who "speak to the heart" — you look and you are moved. Outside phenomena and standards expire. When you are confused, an artist should go back to their own heart, and then the confusion goes.

This was Katharina's discovery — she found the spray gun — and it produced this exhibition. Once you return to what is shared, you strike a chord with your era.

Cui: Mumbling has the feel of whispering. The colors Katharina uses — pure lemon yellow, emerald green — are hard to find in nature; they are refined, very chemical colors, and yet they are sprayed onto soil, building materials, household materials. What I experience is a collision.

K: I find that opposition, that collision, very interesting. I do not paint in watercolor. I spray onto a material, and the material is rough and sharp, so it fights with the color. At the same point there is a contradiction. I am very interested in that uncomfortable, irritated feeling; it is a jolt to the body's senses.

I think this collision, and harmony too, is a way of accepting different things. We can see it and see the contradiction at the same time. Fixing different materials and conflicting things onto one surface is part of what makes painting interesting. One thing I think about is wanting painting to become pure, so that how it looks and how it announces itself feel different from before. I want a sense of a leap, as if jumping into an unknown world, like a quantum jump. That is how I understand contradiction.

At the same time I think a leap has a boundary. What was already fixed in our impressions and what had not yet settled go through a process of being defined again, of settling again.

U: Mumbling and mud are both in-between states; we have no clear way to define them. The title appeals not because it describes anything, but because she is pointing out that the works do not have to be clearly defined. Perhaps we dislike mud, and we would avoid mumbling. Both words carry negative associations, but they also open up more readings, and they show up the fixations of our minds. Sometimes, in a life defined by frameworks, we are obliged to define. But the more we live like that, the more we have to break out, the more freedom we need, the more we have to shake off all these definitions and demarcations. It is a positive kind of escape. The five sections of the show hold that state as well. A solo exhibition is an artist's chance to bring her own thinking together with a space, gathering up that sense of collision by her own force.

K: We came up with the title together, in Berlin. On what Zheng said about Eastern and Western cultural influence and following your own heart — this is not a theoretical debate but a search by other means. Cultural influence is often not fixed. It shifts, and you can keep exploring it and thinking about it.

Zheng: Katharina talks about jumping out — how to jump out of Eastern and Western phenomena. Sometimes it is easy. In the early 1990s I used a spray gun too, a very small one, to render design drawings, but only to solve problems in commercial work. Looking at Katharina's work, I think she has jumped out of what the previous generation put on her.

Exhibition information

Dates: November 10, 2018 – February 24, 2019, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (last entry 7:30 p.m.)

Venue: chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai

Cover image courtesy of the chi K11 Art Museum; banner photographed by QDaily.