bLINK

Katharina Grosse won the competition for the artistic design for the infrastructure area of Olskroken with bLINK, a proposal that creates an experience in which a fictional giant spotlight in space sends pink light to the earth. The areas hit by the beam of light are colored in pink; the railway bridge, the walkways, the bicycle paths and the lawn. In the middle of the light, a gigantic meteorite seems to have landed on top of the new bridge at Olskroken; a 14x11x10 meter large sculpture that transforms the city’s skyline.

Jury’s statement

bLINK presents a unique and independent expression that connects time, space and action. The artistic proposal focuses on movement in the area and provides something unexpected to the landscape. By presenting different materials of the proposal in the same colour, the ensemble will create a strong, magical experience and will make the distinctive character of Olskroken’s infrastructures stand out.

The scale is certainly taken into account and the artwork will be visible even from afar while it will present an immersive environment from nearby, thus offering different possibilities to experience the artwork. From the concept of Chronotopia, the artist has focused on the notion of time situated in a spatial environment. The proposed sculpture becomes a cosmic time capsule that binds together different layers of time, where the contemporary is outlined against the historical strata.

The jury considers that the intervention is strongly integrated in the area; this can be further enhanced by designing the bridge in close collaboration with the artist. bLINK can become a new landmark in the city, situated in an infrastructure landscape where many people pass and where there are visual connections between transport circulation and downtown. bLINK is a powerful grip that stands up against the large-scale traffic landscape scale and in itself creates a place in the middle of the movement of the area.

About Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany) lives and works in Germany as an artist and professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she studied. She has contributed to expand the boundaries of contemporary painting and today her large-scale installations are recognized as pioneer works. With strong colors that spill out across the environments, she invites the visitor to be surrounded by atmospheres, instead of standing next to them as a viewer. Grosse bases her interventions in an attentive observation of the context where they will be implemented, and takes into account questions such as the activation of spaces and the perceptual relations between the artwork and its audiences. Her work conveys an invitation to intensify our perception, to enhance the awareness of the environment we are in and to activate the visionary potential of our imagination.

Grosse is represented in the collections of Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York or Magasin III in Stockholm, among others. In Sweden, she is also known for her artistic intervention in the station building in Vara.