Basel

For the commissioned site-specific project at Messeplatz, the largest urban installation of her career, Katharina Grosse transformed the urban surfaces and existing architectural elements to extend her exploration into the possibilities of painting. Furthering her practice of creating large-scale painting installations, for which she uses an industrial spray gun and brightly coloured paints, CHOIR disrupts the familiar space of everyday passage and conviviality to offer a temporal unexpected reality.

Unrestrained by the built environment, Grosse uses an industrial spray gun to accelerate the scale and speed of her work, embracing fluidity and change as she responds to the varied contingencies she encounters as she paints – from the irregular cityscape and its practical functions to environmental conditions such as light, wind and weather.

Approaching the Messeplatz project as a polyphonic composition inspired by non-standard harmonies and overtones, each element holds its own space, operating on separate levels and surfaces to come together as a collaged, complex and coherent work. Focusing on energy – understood as a shift from order to disorder – Grosse created an unscripted and intangible moment through painting – leaving marks, glitches, residue, and traces of it on the surrounding surfaces. Through the use of highly visible shades of magenta, the scale and textures of Messeplatz, Grosse immerses the visitors in a direct bodily experience in which they are simultaneously looking at the work and becoming part of it, like participants in an unscripted performance. The painting acts as a visceral membrane between reality and fiction: one can walk through it and step out of it at any time, but not ignore it.

CHOIR responds to the context of the Art Basel fair, a mercantile enterprise drawing transient visitors from all over the globe. The painting will last only as long as the week-long fair itself. It is not for sale, it cannot be owned or preserved. Once the fair is over, it will disappear.