Untitled

Curving bands of green, orange, red, and teal sweep across this canvas like they are caught mid-motion. Katharina Grosse, a German artist famous for wielding a spray gun instead of a brush, made this untitled piece in 2010. Rather than painting a scene or a person, she lets color do all the talking. The arcs pile up and cross over one another, creating a sense that the whole surface is spinning or maybe rippling outward, like something dropped into water.

Grosse built her reputation by refusing to stay inside the frame. She has sprayed paint across entire gallery walls, the outsides of buildings, mounds of soil, and heaps of debris, treating color as something that simply cannot be contained. That same restless energy shows up here in the way the layers seem to float at different depths, some bright and close, others fading into a hazy background. Nothing in the image asks to be figured out. The point is the pleasure of watching bold colors blend, glow, and collide.