BMA Violet Hour: Katharina Grosse and Eric N. Mack
Wednesday, December 16 • 6-7pm
presented by the Baltimore Museum of Art
Join us for an in-depth conversation with artists Katharina Grosse and Eric N. Mack, moderated by critic and art historian Dr. Molly Warnock, 2020-21 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.
Inspired by the exhibition Katharina Grosse: Is It You?, on view at the BMA through September 19, 2021, Grosse and Mack discuss the intersections of their work, processes, and inspirations. We’ll hear how childhood visits to museums played a formative role for the work they make today, and how working with architectural or other material givens in different situations has spurred each artist to take their art out of the studio and into the world.
BMA Violet Hour is a series of virtual programming designed to give visitors an opportunity to relax and connect with artists, makers, and the community through a series of engagements including artist talks, special presentations, performances, and interactive activities.
If you haven’t made it to the BMA to see Katharina Grosse: Is It You? in person, you can visit virtually.
This event will stream live on the BMA’s Facebook page.
About Our Guests:
Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is widely known for her in situ paintings, in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes. Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of the medium. Approaching painting as an experience in immersive subjectivity, she uses a spray gun, distancing the artistic act from the hand, and stylizing gesture as a propulsive mark. Grosse began painting at an early age, always attuned to the ways that color and light merged with thought itself.
Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) refers to himself as a painter, yet his works rarely observe the medium’s traditional canvas-to-stretcher format. Rather, his tactile assemblages, created from a dynamic combination of used textiles, worn clothes, moving blankets and torn rags, alongside photographs and pull-outs from books and magazines, extend and transform the notion of painting. His use of color, form, and material as elements in a compositional lexicon, as well as the stained or dyed fabrics which are his principal medium, declare the origin of his practice in the investigation of painting in an expanded field, while the way his compositions occupy and transform space are evidence of their sculptural nature. They are both paintings and sculptures—fully engaging with both disciplines.
Molly Warnock is an art critic and art historian based in Baltimore. The author of Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), she has written widely on modern and contemporary art for, among other journals, Artforum, Art in America, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Tate Papers, Journal of Contemporary Painting, and nonsite.org, as well as for numerous U.S. and European exhibition catalogues. She is a 2020-21 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art.