Katharina Grosse: The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then it Stopped

Overview

As a hulking hive of concrete chambers, 'kaleidoscopic' and 'colourful' are not words one generally has cause to use when describing Carriageworks. But in 2018 German artist Katharina Grosse will descend on Eveleigh to eradicate the industrial austerity of the precinct as she designs and creates an entirely new landscape. Think Houdini's disappearing elephant trick meets the Big Bang.

Using the seemingly simple tools of a spray gun and fabric, Grosse has spent her career distorting or 'folding' conventional spaces, by painting over them and building layers of texture, leaving in their place vivid and beautiful outliers of architecture and design.

Grosse's latest project The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then it Stopped opens at Carriageworks on January 6, and is the most ambitious single-artist commission Carriageworks has undertaken. More than 8250 square metres of fabric (and God knows how much paint) will be used to create an environment of contradictions for the public to stroll through — for free. At once strange and familiar, you'll walk under folds, through holes and be enveloped by a kaleidoscope of colours. If you've ever wanted to spend ten minutes on another planet, Grosse has the keys to the spaceship.

Image: Katharina Grosse, The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped at Carriageworks, 2017. Shot by Zan Wimberley.