For Katharina Grosse (Freiburg, 1961), the world is, and remains, «an immense space to paint». In colour, in dream and in the emotion of something ever greater, richer and more relentless, the need for categorical limitations simply vanishes — and with it every closed door, every unfathomable boundary. From 28 May until 31 January 2027, her site-specific intervention titled Arrels traces and colours the space of the Llotja de Palma.
Built between 1420 and 1452, the Gothic civic jewel of Palma de Mallorca was born to celebrate trade and the exchange of goods from the sea — a place of transit and encounter, before anything else.
It is precisely on the value of cultural encounter and exchange that Katharina Grosse focuses her attention — rather than on the long and tragic history of European hegemony over maritime trade routes. The new environmental project is born from the desire to accentuate the hybridisation of space, to open it up to unexpected layerings.
Individual imagination, here, meets and questions the paths of a pulse capable of welcoming multiple perceptions. As the artist had already confided in an interview in August 2020 with Marc-Christoph Wagner for Arts Life:
[Since I was a girl] when I woke up in the morning I saw shadows in the room and imagined a brush to paint them. […] I don’t know whether I can describe myself as extroverted or not. I like being alone, I have no problem with that. But I think I do the work for someone else. I don’t think about the audience as such. But I absolutely want [every project of mine] to be seen. And I think it has to be loud.
Branches, powders and pigments embrace the interiors in a field of colour inhabited by sensation. In what appears as a playfully wild territory, an unveiled labyrinth guides the visitor through the many lives and voices that may have, over time, become part of an architecture. The eye notes passages and essences — perhaps as fragrant as the spices of a journey already partly travelled. Echoes of a rainbow restore possibility. The tall, uncapturable walls do the rest.
Article by Floriana Savino
