Rainer Gross

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Overview

PO`W III, 2022

Aquarell
16 × 19 cm
Signed, dated and titled
Provenance:
Studio of the artist
Literature:
Blau: Von farblichen Akzenten zur Monochromie V, Ausst.-Kat. Galerie Koch, Hannover 2023, S. 30f.
Since 1993 at the latest, with the start of his abstract, non-objective work cycles, colour has been the primary theme in a colouristic and material sense for Cologne-born painter Rainer Gross, who has lived in New York since 1973. This is also the case in his watercolour "PO'W III", which shows a composition of stripes of divergent shades of blue of different widths, some placed next to each other, some on top of each other. The varying transparency of the stripes and the different blue tones create an alternation of light and dark, of luminosity and opacity.

"PO'W III" is part of a series created by the artist in 2022, in which he not only uses diverging shades of blue, but also different colours in watercolour technique in their colouristic interplay as his subject. The artist uses the form of stripes or broad bands. Stripe structures can already be found in Gross's artistic oeuvre at the end of the 1980s in the still figurative works of the "Ohne Worte" (1989-93) group of works, then more decisively in the "Fingertip Tingling" (1993-96) and the subsequent "Contact Paintings" (from 1996) and could have their starting point in his "Portrait of a Brush Stroke" (1974, acrylic/canvas).