The exhibition of Katharina Grosse marks the start of a pilot project at the Neues Museum. Volker Staab's exceptional architecture presents six rooms directly behind the glass façade spanning two floors that can be seen into from the outside as if through a shop window. They are the location for the new exhibition format /prospekt/.
This series of exhibitions due to be held along the façade will be launched in spectacular fashion by the internationally acclaimed artist Katharina Grosse. She has conceived a work specifically for this highly unusual, upwardly sweeping spatial situation and will also be installing a sculpture, over five metres high, on the square in front of the museum, which will establish a correspondence with the indoor galleries.
In her works Katharina Grosse combines canvases with objects, interiors and entire sections of buildings, piles of earth and vast spherical arrangements with painterly dynamism, causing the pictorial surface to merge increasingly into the volume of the space. How can colour open up space and achieve depth, or remain flat and without volume? What happens to architecture and the objects within it when they are coated with colour, and where, ultimately, is the viewer's perspective directed in the opposing lines of vision from the outside to the inside and vice versa? These are the issues addressed by a notion of painting that has long since stepped beyond the boundaries of the canvas and entered the surrounding space.