Eliana Willis

German artist Katharina Grosse might technically be classified as a painter, but the artist has made a career out of exploding the limitations of the medium (sometimes quite literally). Her sprawling interventions and installations call attention to the architecture in which they are installed and encourage viewers to walk around, atop, and sometimes inside them.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2014, the artist describes her process as an attempt to “reset the idea of what a painting can be.” As Grosse’s works became larger, with site-specific commissions at Brooklyn’s MetroTech Plaza and Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, she began collaborating with her brother, who works as an engineer.
Speaking about the impact of having a non-art worker as part of her team, Grosse said that she benefitted from her brother’s ability to “connect the theoretical thinking” of the engineering process to the practical aspects of building large-scale works.
Katharina Grosse, Mumbling Mud – Silk Studio (2018) at K11 Art Museum. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria, © 2021 Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
“My work is not idea-based, it’s really thought based,” the artist said, describing it as a fluid process that is also physically engaging. In an upcoming installation at the Helsinki Art Museum, Grosse will be on site painting while viewers wander in and out, becoming active participants in the creation process.
In the Helsinki exhibition, which opens June 8, the artist’s work will take over the main exhibition halls—which Grosse hopes will also challenge the hierarchy of media.
“Am I a painter? Am I a sculptor? I don’t know,” Grosse said in the interview. “I’m talking to the world while painting on it.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. Katharina Grosse: Chill Seeping From The Walls Gets Between Us,” opens June 8 at the Helsinki Museum. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org
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The Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris reopened last week with its first solo show dedicated to a contemporary African artist: Barthélémy Toguo. Displayed alongside historical African artworks, the Cameroonian multimedia artist’s exhibition addresses viruses, immigration, the lynching of African Americans, African dictators, and the shortage of water.
Titled “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo,” it is curated by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, director of Fondation Dapper. Launched in Amsterdam in 1983 by Michel Leveau to support African and Caribbean art, the foundation was given carte blanche for the exhibition.
Particularly pertinent is Vaincre le virus! (Beat the virus) (2016). The six-and-a-half feet tall vases depicting bats, red hands, and patterns relating to the transmission of the Ebola and HIV viruses were realized five years ago when Toguo was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp. After carrying out research with scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to glean ideas on how to convey the viruses visually, Toguo had the vases produced in Jingdezhen, China, which is renowned for ceramics.
“In 2016, I talked about the problem of viruses and how we should encourage scientists to find the viruses that are threatening the world—it was a universal message but nobody listened to me,” Toguo told Artnet News. “Then in 2020 came the worldwide problem of Covid-19 that mobilized the world of science and medicine.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Strange Fruit. Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Nearby is the disquieting installation Strange Fruit (2017). Next to an empty noose tied to a branch are a swooping vulture, crows and aggressive dogs all in brass. Vinyl records from Billie Holiday’s 1939 record about lynchings in the American South, the sleeves painted with an open-mouthed face, are scattered among the branches. “I wanted to talk about the mistreatment of Black people and then a few years later [the murder of] George Floyd happened,” Toguo said.
Born in Cameroon in 1967, Toguo studied at the fine arts school of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, then in Grenoble and the Dusseldorf arts academy. In Dusseldorf, he was taught by the Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis and encountered Tony Cragg.
In 2015, his work featured in the Venice Biennale, eight years after he refused to participate in the African Pavilion organized by the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. “The proposal was reductive because Africa is not a country but a region and I maintain my position about that problematic ghettoization of African artists,” he said. “My stance upset the Italians.”
It was reading the French author Albert Camus’s 1957 Nobel Prize speech, about an artist’s obligation to move the largest number of people by offering an image of common suffering and joy, that instilled in Toguo his sense of mission.
“Camus’s thoughts on the role of an artist fascinated me,” Toguo recalled. “I told myself that I have a role in society to bring a message. For me, an artist is a visionary who has the capacity to look into the future, see societal problems and inform people through his production.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Water Matters (2020). Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Some artworks evoke ideas metaphorically. Road to Exile (2008)—a wooden boat overflowing with cushions in African fabrics and surrounded by innumerable bottles of water—expresses the precariousness of young Africans trying to reach Europe in boats that might capsize. The newest work, Water Matters (2020), made for the exhibition, comprises a painting of a figure with outstretched palms in front of a table lined with glass bottles. It pertains to Toguo’s desire to redistribute water between countries that have too little and those that have too much.
Around 50 works by Toguo are presented along with historical African artworks from Fondation Dapper, the Musée du Quai Branly, and other collections that find a resonance with his pieces. The first two parts showcase works relating to the body, such as a painting of bleeding hands wounded by nails.
“I tried to identify recurring elements in Barthélémy Toguo’s work and noticed the presence in his paintings and drawings of nails, which hark back to Christ and the crucifixion, but also to objects used by people in Congo to master negative forces,” Falgayrettes-Leveau said. “Although he didn’t consciously reflect upon this aspect of African heritage, they’re unconscious references.”
Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Toguo’s engagement as an artist extends far beyond his own practice. In 2013, he created Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, encompassing an art center, artists’ residency and coffee plantation. “There was no place to celebrate art in Cameroon and, with all my experience, I needed to give something back to Africa,” said Toguo, who divides his time between Cameroon and Paris. “All my artistic production was in western museums like Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.”
Vocal about the need for the African continent to acquire artworks by its artists, Toguo added: “Whereas African masks were stolen by colonizers and remained in the west, contemporary works by Romuald Hazoumè, Chéri Samba and El Anatsui have been bought by western museums who recognize their value. But there is nothing in Africa because politicians don’t know [about contemporary art]. So I’ve created a space for artistic exchanges. Kounellis gave me three drawings and artists worldwide have given me works that I’ve installed alongside African artists like Soly Cissé and Siriki Ky.”
The Musée du Quai Branly, which is restituting 26 works to Benin, has been called upon by a group of African activists to restitute more pieces to the continent. But that is a “different issue”, pointed out Toguo, who was clearly elated about his solo show: “I’m astonished and moved because this is the first time that this curatorial eye has been applied to my work.”
“Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris through December 5.
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Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and Carrie Mae Weems are among the dozen artists who will reflect on the cultural legacy of the Great Migration in an ambitious opening next year at the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art.
The exhibition, “Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” which is set to open at the Mississippi Museum in April 2022, before traveling to Baltimiore in October, also includes new commissions from artists Akea Brionne Brown, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards.
“The project is grounded in a key prompt,” said Mississippi Museum chief curator Ryan Dennis and Baltimore Museum associate curator Jessica Bell Brown, who co-organized the show, in a joint statement. “‘What would happen if today’s leading artists were given the space to think about the intersections of the Great Migration in a wholistic, expansive, and dynamic way?’”
The artists, all of whom are Black, work in practices that “deal with personal and communal histories, familial ties, the Black experience, and the ramifications of land ownership and environmental shifts, among so much more, to consider how we can expand our understanding of this essential moment in American history,” the curators added.  

Seeking economic opportunities and freedom from Jim Crow laws, more than six million African Americans relocated from the post-Reconstruction South to urban areas in the West, Midwest, and Northeastern U.S. from 1916 through the 1970s. The Great Migration, as the phenomenon was called, forever changed the creative landscape of the country. 
Accompanying the show will be a two-volume publication, including newly commissioned essays by writers Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie J. Wright.
“The exhibition will attend to and complicate histories of racial violence, trauma, and socio-economic exigency, while also examining the agency seized by those who fled as well as those who stayed behind,” said Dennis and Brown. “In many ways, the story of the Great Migration is neither complete in its current telling nor finished in its contemporary unfolding.”
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