Asta Gröting

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.

Her films and sculptures are interested in looking intently with a microscopic focus at surfaces, appearances and effects in order to ascertain what lies beneath them.

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.”[7] Touch is an ongoing series, which the artist started in 2015.

[8] In The Traveling Carriage of Goethe the Mercedes of Adenauer and My Smart (2011) Gröting made full-scale casts of the undersides of three vehicles from three different centuries.

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.

“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.”[10] From the early nineties onwards, Gröting took beside sculpture an interest in immaterial media like performance and video.

[12] 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 (FRAC), Limoges, France / Fundació la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain / Hypo-Bank, Munich / Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), 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 (SMAK), Gent, Belgium / Valdemar Gerdin, Stockholm, Sweden/ Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal