If you’re haven’t finished your holiday shopping, first, check out our Holiday Gift Guide, and then stop by NorthPark Center to feast your eyes on form and color. Two artworks by Germany-based artist Katharina Grosse are now on view at NorthPark Center. Ohne Titel, 2014, and Wunderblock, 2013, and will join the NorthPark Center Art Collection which includes works by internationally known artists, including Huma Bhabha, Jonathan Borofsky, Mark di Suvero, Leonardo Drew, and Joel Shapiro.
Grosse is known for her brightly colored acrylic paintings and installations which are exemplified in these acquisitions. Often using an industrial airbrush, layers of paint, or mounds of pigmented dirt, Grosse directly paints onto architecture, interiors, landscapes, canvases, sculpted Styrofoam, and fiberglass shapes.
Grosse’s work draws inspiration from art historical references such as frescoes, Plein-air painting, Abstract Expressionism, and urban graffiti, and expands the confines of traditional art historical categories such as two-dimensional painting, giving vibrant hues palpable form that become inseparable from the surfaces they cover.
Wunderblock expertly exemplifies Grosse’s clever intertwining of painting, sculpture, and architecture on a monumental scale. The word “wunderblock” is the German term for an old-fashioned children’s toy, known in English as a magic slate; children write on the surface, then “erase” their marks by lifting the cover.
In 1925, the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud wrote an important essay entitled “Notes on the Wunderblock,” in which he compared the operation of memory and the nature of the unconscious to the layered construction of this toy. When using a “wunderblock,” a permanent trace of all that is written is retained upon the back slab; Freud compares these layers of barely legible traces to memory or the unconscious. Through the layers of paint in Wunderblock, Grosse too records a form of “memory” – what she calls “the residue” of her thought process. The artist states, “A painting is simply a screen between the producer and the spectator where both can look at the thought processes residing on the screen from different angles and points in time… It enables me to look at the residue of my thinking.”
Though the “Father of Psychology” has a terrible record of being correct in the light of modern psychology, Wunderblock and Ohne Titel lead the artist and viewer through a memorizing journey of memory, form, color, and scale that will brighten even the most hectic holiday shopping trip.