K11 Art Foundation

German artist Katharina Grosse’s solo exhibition Mumbling Mud, which debuted in Shanghai in 2018, tours to Guangzhou. Using the spray gun as her primary painting tool, Grosse has applied variegated swaths of paint across the walls of exhibition spaces, her own bed, an entire house and its surroundings, and arranged objects such as piles of soil and tree trunks to create large-scale site-related paintings. She has thus been able to liberate the application of paint from its immediate connection to both the painter’s body and any predetermined surfaces of the Western painting tradition. With colour, she traverses the established borders between objects and architectural settings, and ultimately offers models for imagining reality in ways previously unconceived by semiotic conventions, hierarchies, and social rules.

Divided into three zones, two at chi K11 art space at L4 and one at ART CONNEXION at L3 of the K11 Art Mall in Guangzhou, Mumbling Mud leads visitors through an immersive, labyrinthine passage. Upon entering the first zone at chi K11 art space, visitors immediately find themselves surrounded by a labyrinthine structure made up of hundreds of meters of coarse fabric draping from the ceilings and covered in multicoloured paint. Spectators are invited to meander through the three zones by following the painterly traces that Grosse left. The amorphous, muticoloured forms and shapes sprayed across the varying structures and draping cloths may also create an experience of wandering on the peripheries of the familiar, inviting rumination into the quintessential strangeness of a metropolis that is ever-changing and impossible to be delineated in simple contours. At ART CONNEXION at L3, one encounters large curtains of silk displaying printed reproductions of the walls of Grosse’s studio in Berlin. A cinematographic staccato of images exposes paintings and sculptural works in the making along with the traces they have left. The printed images oscillate between presence and absence, between now and then, and introduce a situation of memory and recollection which provides a time gap in the continuum of the exhibition.