The Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia presents “Apollo, Apollo,” a new installation by Katharina Grosse curated by Claire Staebler and on view now coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale.
For three decades, Grosse’s expansive, immersive works have surpassed viewers’s preconceptions of painting—and the boundaries of frame and canvas—embracing floors, walls, ceilings, objects and entire landscapes to comprise multi-dimensional pictorial sites. In 2013, she broadened her scope further and began printing photographs related to her painting practice—works in progress, studio views, hue-clotted hands—on polyester and silk. These wall-sized prints, too, dialogue with the architecture around them and disrupt the senses before them.
Portrait of Katharina Grosse, couretsy of Louis Vuitton.
Installation view of “Apollo, Apollo,” Katharina Grosse, Louis Vuitton, 2022; © Katharina Grosse, courtesy of the artist.
Specifically created for the location, “Apollo, Apollo” features a composite image of the artist’s hands printed on a metallic mesh fabric on a black background covering the floor and the wall. The borders between the artist’s material and her own body blur in the act of her creation. Beyond the imaginative paradoxes of its creator, the work also reflects its Venetian context: the metallic fluidity and hot-hued intensity of “Apollo, Apollo” resonate with the Fortuny fabrics, Terrazzo mosaics, and omnipresent reflections in the water around it. The polysemic, mantric title resonates mythological memory with the conquest of space, a half-dream with planetary heft. The show melds clear with opaque form, letting outer light filter through the tension and release of form in a quintessentially Venetian mirror effect.
In Grosse’s words, “The image is chosen from a series of photographs showing situations or actions, connected to my painting practice in some way or another,” said Grosse. “It oscillates between surface, texture, image and object, order and disorder, destruction and creation, tension and release, forced and free-flowing movement.”
