Katharina Grosse is a contemporary German painter known for her brightly colored acrylic paintings and installations. Made with an industrial air brush and mounds of pigmented dirt, her work attempts to create a bodily, psychedelic-like experience for the viewer in which they are submerged in a world of color and mood, rather than merely being a bystander looking in. “The painting process is a curious coincidence of thinking and acting,” she has said. “It is the continuous flux of visual intelligence constituting reality in every moment. Aggression is the energy that enables you to bear the loss of what has to go. It feeds and sustains that process.”

In her inventive use of materials and color, Grosse combines the unlikely pairing of Color Field painters like Morris Louis with Conceptual Land artists like Robert Smithson. Born on October 2, 1961 in Freiburg, Germany, she went on to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she now serves as a professor. Grosse’s works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthaus in Zürich, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. She lives and works between Düsseldorf and Berlin, Germany.

• Tags: Art, contemporary, Design, installation, painter, psychedelic