Carriageworks in Sydney has commissioned renowned German artist Katharina Grosse to create a spectacular, site-specific installation in Australia as the third in the Schwartz Carriageworks series of major international visual arts projects. To be unveiled at Carriageworks on January 6 as part of Sydney Festival 2018 and running until April 8, 2018, this exciting new work will respond to the unique industrial architecture and grand scale of the heritage building.

Grosse is best known for her works of kaleidoscopic colour and epic scale, transforming space by breaking out of the traditional boundaries of painting, and engaging visitors as both observers and participants in her work.

For Grosse, painting is an experience in immersive subjectivity, from her canvases and sculptures to her in situ works, painted directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes. Working with a spray gun, she implements multi-dimensional visual effects over surfaces and textures to create sublime and otherworldly environments. She first introduced voluminous fabric into her painting in 2014.

Katharina Grosse explained: “I was fascinated by the thought of folding space. I was interested in taking this vast surface and shrinking it byfolding or, actually, hiding the entirety of what’s there. I understand a painting as something that, as we view it, travels through us and realigns our connections with the world.”

Working directly on site at Carriageworks, Grosse will envelop the Public Space in more than 8250 square metres of suspended fabric—draped, knotted and hung across and through the architectural elements of the building—using a palette of raw colour to create a vast painting over the layers of folds. Visitors will be able to enter this total environment and experience the transformation of Carriagework’s historic structure.

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg/Breisbau, Germany and currently lives and works in Berlin. She is internationally recognised as one of the most influential and inventive visual artists of our time, and her work is featured in the collections of many of the world’s leading institutions. Grosse’s site-specific installations include Untitled, 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998); Untitled, Toronto Pearson International Airport (2003); Picture Park, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2007); psychylustro, Mural Arts Philadelphia (2014); Untitled, Facebook headquarters, Menlo Park, CA (2015); Untitled Trumpet, 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); Rockaway!for MoMA PS1’s “Rockaway!” program (2016); and Asphalt Air and Hair, ARoS Aarhus Triennale (2017).