JUNE 02 – JULY 30 2017 Group exhibition, ARoS THE GARDEN – End of Times; Beginning of Times. The Garden - The Future, Aarhus, Denmark
Excerpt from interview by Marie Nipper (The curatorial team from ARoS - external curator) with Katharina Grosse.
MN: How have you approached the idea of the garden and nature for this project?
KG: I wanted to do something very simple, almost instinctively natural or casual, very much like scribbling with a felt pen on the edge of your shoes. In that sense, scribbling is a gesture of the ‘natural’ that I allow to interfere with the garden´s controlled principles of nature. Foucault said that ‘the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space’. Accordingly, my painting is a mobile ‘garden’ able to move across space. My paintings can land anywhere at any time, so can your thoughts, and therefore they transform your understanding of every moment from the most intimate to the political. Looking at the paintings bids us to understand that things look different every time, even if we console ourselves that we are familiar with a revisited situation. It’s a simple but powerful move to really feel that everything is different every time. Therefore, we don’t need the big solution once and for all, but we go along most naturally with constant change. The scribble as a casual, even endless, forming of links to our knowing of fluidity. Our embrace of uncertainty catalyses us to generate different paradigms according to a constant and ongoing evaluation within and around ourselves. It influences how we look at gender, race, society, or politics. ...
Interview to be published soon in the catalogue to accompany the Triennial. An extensive and well-illustrated catalogue, published in collaboration with König Books, London, covering all three parts of the exhibition. http://en.aros.dk/about-aros/press/2017/the-garden-the-past