Archive / Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse

On the occasion of Jackson Pollock’s Birthday who would have turned 101 today I’d like to give you a little throwback to the exhibition I did in Boston in 2019. I was invited by the Fine Arts Museum to create a mural in response to Jackson Pollock’s famous Mural from 1943. Both of us are breaking with the long tradition of the genre of the mural, which historically describes a painting made directly on, or permanently affixed to, a wall. While Pollock was working on a mural sized canvas I’ve created three floating cloth panels which bisect the gallery and suggest a mural without walls. “Grosse’s way of working, which involves the body, brings her painting process close to that of Pollock, yet she qualifies the expression of bodily traces in the image. Instead of drops of paint as in Pollock’s drip paintings, which reflect the artist’s hand, or effusive sweeps of the brush as a sign of emotional arousal. Grosse expands her brushstrokes into entire fields of color, spreads her gestural flourishes over several paintings, and dissolves the textures of the paint into myriads of tiny drops that settle on the image like mist.”

From “Performing Painting” by Kathleen Bühler, Chief Curator at Kunstmuseum Bern, in the catalogue of my current solo-show Katharina Grosse, Studio Painintgs: 1988 – 2022, which is traveling to the Kunstmuseum Bern next

Image 1 – 4

Installation shots of Mural: Jackson Pollock / Katharina Grosse ©️ Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023 / Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Courtesy :Gagosian and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Photo: Greg Heins

Image 5, 7 – 8 & movie

Photo: Studio Grosse