Walk into the South London Gallery’s large central space, voided of any objects, and all that fills the room are Katherina Grosse’s bright, blazing colours – huge arcs of the stuff, spray-painted directly on to the white walls, ceiling and floor.
Architectural details of the Victorian-era building, such as the neoclassical doorways, are not immune to Grosse’s painterly treatment; even plug sockets don’t escape the artist’s vivid washes of colour. The traditional notion of painting is exploded by Grosse’s exuberant use of acrylic paint on a massive scale. Here, as elsewhere in her work (which sees her painting on boulders, building sites and grass), paint is applied to the wider world, graffiti-style, rather than to the isolated area of a canvas.
The German artist’s only additional interventions at SLG are two films she has selected to screen upstairs. One is a feature-length documentary by Belgian director Agnès Varda, ‘The Gleaners and I’; the other is a half-hour piece from Claudia Müller’s series ‘Women Artists’, in which Grosse curates a fantasy exhibition. The latter sees Grosse explain her choice of works by eight other female artists, and discuss relationships between the works that would make up her ideal group show. The film offers insights into the artist’s interests, which is more than can be said for the slightly puzzling inclusion of Varda’s film, profiling those living on society’s leftovers – from countryside scavengers collecting the harvest’s remains to urban magpies turning street junk into art.
Back in the gallery, children run amok, delighted with their rainbow surroundings, while parents beam and snap away, and couples pose together for technicolour selfies. In its psychedelic simplicity, ‘This Drove My Mother up the Wall’ is heavily reminiscent of the pink entrance to nearby Frank’s Cafe. Like the rooftop bar – made famous by the multitude of selfies taken in its bubblegum-hued stairwell – Grosse’s piece provides the perfect backdrop for a social media photoshoot. Maybe, just maybe, this is the ideal outcome for an artist so focused on blurring the art-life divide.