Asta Gröting


Asta Gröting is a contemporary artist. She works in a variety of media like sculpture, performance, and video. In her work, Gröting “is conceptually and emotionally asking questions of the social body by taking something away from it and allowing this absence to do the talking.”

Biography

Asta Gröting studied sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, graduating in 1986. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at KINDL - Centre for Contemporary Art Berlin, the :de:Kunstraum Dornbirn|Kunstraum Dornbirn, the :de:Neuer Berliner Kunstverein|Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the LENTOS Art Museum in Linz, and the Henry Moore Sculpture Institute, among others. She has also participated in international group exhibitions at venues including the Maas Museum in Sydney, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, the :de:Hartware Medienkunstverein|Hartware Medienkunstverein Dortmund, and the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo. She is currently a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art.
Gröting's earlier work focused on sculpture, before she also turned to video and performance, starting 1993. Gröting's works often present ordinary, familiar elements, where the viewer's attention is drawn towards their material transformation, caused by the exaggeration of the familiar. In Gröting’s work there is a focus on what is not visible, like the inner voice, the space between lovers having sex, the digestive system, or the inside of holes made by bullets, and the ways in which the invisible can be brought to the surface. As such, she allows absence to do the talking. In these explorations a sense of realism is at work that pays attention to what is not considered to be beautiful, or to what is seen as damaged or even damaging. It develops works that convert psychological and emotional perspectives to the complex relationships of people into clear forms. Often they are presented in work groups or series.

Series (selection)

Berlin Fassaden consists of a series of negative imprints made out of silicone that are monumental in size. They track the traces of the bullet holes made during war in facades that have not yet been renovated. For Gröting the casts function as photographic long exposures that depict the story from the moment of the bullets’ impact to the present time, taking along dust, dirt, and even graffiti. “I want to look from inside these destroyed walls and facades into the world,” Gröting says, “as if I could see my own face staring back at me.”
Touch is an ongoing series, which the artist started in 2015. Gröting invited a number of friends to sit for a portrait. The portrait consists of the artist tracing the contours of their face with her hands. It recalls the gestures of sculpting, reading the face’s expression. Although it’s a touching of a surface, it’s at the same time also a most intimate conversation.
In The Traveling Carriage of Goethe the Mercedes of Adenauer and My Smart Gröting made full-scale casts of the undersides of three vehicles from three different centuries. The rubber molds visualize a sculptural history of movement. Motion is also the topic of Gröting’s video Parken, in which from a bird’s eye view we see several cars competing for a parking space.
Space Between Lovers is the materialization of a physical intimate moment. Two actors were covered in silicone while they were having sex. In this way, the in-between, the inner space was visualized sculpturally. Both intimacy and distance define also Space Between a Family, which consists of life-size casts of members of Gröting’s family made over the course of several years. “It is not hard to imagine that these introspective figures possess internal organs,” the British author Deborah Levy writes, “but they are uncanny too, mournful grey ghosts of substance who seem to be emerging from both a war and a womb.”
From the early nineties onwards, Gröting took beside sculpture an interest in immaterial media like performance and video. For The Inner Voice Gröting explored ventriloquism as a performative instrument to research the soul and its inner workings. A series of videos came about depicting conversations between a dummy created by the artist and ventriloquists from all over the world. In their own native language they performed dialogues written by Gröting, Deborah Levy, and Tim Etchells. On several occasions Gröting worked together with the Native American ventriloquist Buddy Big Mountain.

Solo Exhibitions (Selection)

Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie for the Collection Nationalgalerie Berlin, Berlin / Arnold Forde, Los Angeles, USACarol Schwartz, Denver, USA / Collection Helga de Alvear, Madrid, Spain / evn sammlung, Maria Enzersdorf, Austria / Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain, Limoges, France / Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain / Hypo - Bank, Munich / Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart / Jerome Stern, New York, USA / Koç Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey / Landesbank Baden- Württemberg, Stuttgart / MARTa Herford, Herford / Museum Ludwig, Cologne / Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, USA / Sammlung Block, Berlin / Sammlung Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt a.M. / Sammlung Goetz, Munich / Sammlung Grässlin, St. Georgen / Sammlung Schwenk, Haigerloch / Staatsgalerie Stuttgart / Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium / Valdemar Gerdin, Stockholm, Sweden/ Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal