Anna Corrigan reviews the recent exhibition Katharina Grosse: The Smoking Kid at Johan König, Berlin.
Corrigan observes: "Though this show engages with space and structure in a less explicit way than previous installations and sculpture-based exhibitions, Grosse’s placement of these large-scale paintings in a luminous and immensely spacious gallery successfully questions the relationship between incidental and fabricated space on more subtle terms. This show constitutes a seemingly more conventional approach by Grosse, taking on similar artistic concerns in a new context and approach. However, in the composition of space, and in the paintings exhibited, the orderly and disciplinary layout of the gallery is interrogated at the most basic and explicit level. Grosse taps into the potential for two-dimensional, pictorial space to scramble, expand, or otherwise intervene in the spatial relationships of the viewing of art."