Katharina Grosse. Contemporary Painters Series. Gregory Volk.

This is the first comprehensive monograph on the innovative and expansive on-site paintings of German artist Katharina Grosse. Grosse's daring move from the canvas into architectural and urban space, with her signature colorful sites, has resulted in a deeply compelling body of work. From a Toronto airport to a decrepit beach structure on the New York coast and the spaces of major museums worldwide, Grosse's works present thorough, if often temporary, carnivalesque transformations of extant places and situations. Gregory Volk has known Katharina Grosse and written about her work since the very outset of her career, witnessing her journey from unique talent to radical vision and risk. As he suggests, Grosse's continually-developing practice, simultaneously ungainly and exhilarating, bewildering and liberating, radically extends the possibilities for contemporary abstract painting. Gregory Volk is an art critic, curator, and former associate professor in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media and the Department of Painting + Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is Contributing Editor for Art in America, frequently contributes to Hyperallergic, and has written for many other publications, exhibition catalogues and books.