Katharina Grosse’s painting-installations have evolved dramatically since she began producing them in the late 1990s. Experienced first as an extension of flat painted surfaces into multiple dimensions, in recent years Grosse’s work has taken on more of the fundamental problems of sculpture and architecture as she began transforming ever-larger spaces, with the result that she has developed an area of visual expression that is rapidly becoming her own.

While many other artists working today have also pushed beyond the picture frame and out into sculptural space, what separates Grosse from the rest is her insistence that paint possesses a physicality unto itself, a viscous essence that can be varioously expressed by pouring, spraying, smearing, or dripping, but is never other than fluid. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that along with her room-scaled interventions, Grosse continues to make conventional paintings on stretched canvas, and tends to see even the most spatially complex situation as fundamentally pictorial in nature.

The essence of Grosse’s mission is her investigation of the inherent properties of color, especially the degree to which these transform the nature of the space in which they are deployed. For this reason, we are less concerned with the actual edges where her art bumps up against, or overlaps with, its container than we are in those areas where the painterly activity achieves its greatest density. In this way, our motivation to create a context for the experience of color spurs us to project a noticeably flat support onto Gosse’s installations, even when they possess nothing of the sort.

Grosse’s Taipei Biennial installation proposes a transformation of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum lobby into a clearly enunciated spectacle of radiant color appearing, at points, to hover in midair. Sand piles and rivulets of pigment, along with large styrofoam panels, expand the field without ever diverging from the feeling that the paint is a kind of skin. Although the lobby creates an imposing challenge by way of its massive vertical thrust and its view to the surrounding park, Grosse’s installation provides a compelling rebuttal to our frequent insistence that the museum serve as a completely neutral container for the art it displays.