Katharina Grosse: Canyon

Canyon—a new commission by Katharina Grosse—will be on public display at Fondation Louis Vuitton from 5 October 2022. This installation is the latest commission inspired by the architecture of the Frank Gehry building and follows those by Olafur Eliasson, Ellsworth Kelly, and Adrián Villar Rojas.

Composed of eight five-millimeter-thick aluminium sheet “petals” spray-painted with acrylic and connected to a beam, Canyon is a response to the artist’s question: “How can a painting appear in a space with no floor and no walls, where air, light, and energies circulate?” It is a reference to the characteristics of the “canyon” (the name given to the void that is visible inside the Fondation Louis Vuitton building from the ground up).

Echoing Frank Gehry’s glass facade—a ship moored to a cascade—the artist has hoisted a kind of cut-out sail using a pulley, creating a tense exchange with the architecture. From the work’s conception, a close dialogue has been established between the artist and the architect—a passionate debate around the use of color in a pre-existing building.

Canyon is visible from the Fondation’s different floors. Featuring curves and counter-curves, the work defies gravity by combining elegance and monumentality in a kind of choreography with the building.

This commission is an extension of two new interventions by Katharina Grosse last spring: Splinter (2022), part of the “Color in Fugues” exhibition in Paris; and Apollo, Apollo (2022) in Venice, part of the Fondation’s “Hors les Murs” [off-site] program and the 59th International Art Exhibition,Venice.

About the artist Katharina Grosse

Since the late 1990s, Katharina Grosse has earned an international reputation thanks to her large-scale site-specific works made using a spray paint technique. Her often spectacular and strikingly colored monumental interventions explore the potentialities of space by extending well beyond the limits of a frame or canvas, embracing the floors, walls, ceilings, and all other existing elements to create pictorial landscapes that seem to want to transform the world.

Her recent exhibitions and on-site interventions include: “Rockaway,” MOMA PS1’s “Rockaway!” program in Fort Tilden, New York (2016); “Asphalt Air and Hair,” ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017); “The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Meters, Then It Stopped,” Carriageworks, Sydney (2018); “Wunderbild,” National Gallery, Prague (2018/2019); “It Wasn’t Us,” Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2020-2021); “Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us,” Ham – Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki (2021-2022); “Shutter Splinter,” Helsinki Biennial (2021); “Apollo, Apollo,” Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, Venice (2022); “Splinter,” Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); “Destroy Me Once, Destroy Me Twice,” Roskilde Festival, Denmark (2022).