By Alex Redmon
The initial approach to Wunder-Block hits you in the face with space. Walking down the stairs at the Nasher, Katharina Grosse’s latest Dallas installation has you feeling like you’re about to step into a full page Spaceman Spiff spread. Downstairs, you queue outside the glass wall enclosing the exhibit, donning scrubs-teal polyester scrunchie-socks over your shoes. Your transformation into an interstellar traveler has begun.
Before you begin your walk, you naturally have to undergo what any space weathered astronaut will tell you they've seen plenty of – training. Fortunately I’d come stocked with a notepad, and managed to inscribe the entire lecture down verbatim – “Stay on the path.”
There’s something to art that you can stand on, and walking the thin beaten trail through Technicolor mounds of rock and dirt afford you plenty of moments to stop and crane around from your somewhat unique 360 view of silent color topography. Though initially the giant white boards drizzled with the hues of the floor and leaned against the walls almost seem weak compared to the rest of the piece, the redemption they receive once you reach the right angle to see the shadows they've kept harboring depth and secrets in makes you wonder why you ever second guessed them in the first place.
Once you've turned in your blue booties and gone out to the garden, you’ll find out that Wunder-Block has been following you. Giant, colorful, and mostly abstract but slightly insect in nature, these works feel in form like a film negative reversal of the room you've just left. Out in the fresh air, one lurking under the trees and one half inside and half outside the gallery, they make for an excellent component to the art du jor.
A response to the work of Renzo Piano, it’s no surprise that this showing is both large and outside the ordinary while not breaking entirely from existing concepts. Nemo Science Centre’s angles and texture waterside and the post-modern façade of the NYT building are broken into fungible hunks of pigment – Grosse is clearly playing Piano’s themes to her tune. Wunder-Block is aware of temporality – it’s why you have to keep on the path. Given the nature of the primary exhibit, every step disturbs the paint-capped dust underneath the viewer, instilling yet another element of individuality into each viewing as the colors smudge and dissipate.
If you see one German-created Dallas-installed walk-in art installation this summer, see Wunder-Block! Now in 3D, brought to you by the people that made this wildly wicked web site: http://www.katharinagrosse.com/