Tastemaker Catherine Grossrieder
CathLove tells Madeline Gressel about her passion for cartoon-style art
Artist, graphic designer and DJ Catherine Grossrieder's love of drawing started in her youth. "I always wanted cartoons to go on forever," she says. "When they stopped, I would draw, trying to follow them, trying to keep them alive and keep the imagination going. It was a hard truth that there is no cartoon that goes on forever. And so I'm going to try to do it myself. I guess that was the start."
Although Grossrieder (also known as CathLove) has only been working in Hong Kong for a year, she has already made a name for herself as a talented member of a promising young cohort of local artists who blur the boundary between street and gallery. This autumn, she competed in the internationally franchised graffiti battle Secret Walls, co-organised by Hong Kong's reigning street art gallery, Above Second. The only woman competitor, she came second.
I can draw more realistically, but I'm trying to veer away from doing things to appease or attract people. I just want to do what I really enjoy, and that's cartoon style.
Grossrieder's work, recognisable on walls around Hong Kong, blends youthful enthusiasm and a thickly lined cartoon style with raunchy and subversive themes. Her pieces often feature a stylised version of herself in bold and powerful incarnations - her Secret Walls final piece showed CathLove as Viking, spearing skulls and stomping on ghouls.
Born in Bangkok to a Thai mother and a Swiss father, Grossrieder was raised in Hong Kong and has since lived in Australia and Britain. "I can't really quite place geographically where my style originates," she says. "Some people call it Asian, some call it European. It's just me."
She cites popular cartoons as her earliest inspiration, from Disney to Hanna-Barbera to Bebe's Kids, a 1992 American animated comedy. In her teens, she became immersed in skateboarding culture, and spent hours studying skate decks (the flat body of a skateboard) in skating magazines. The art, she says, "had a profound influence on my style." Later, she turned towards influential comic book artists like Frank Frazetta, Moebius, Milo Manara and Robert Crumb.
Growing up, Grossrieder says, she was a "bit of a tomboy" and a rebel. On a summer trip to Switzerland, she discovered graffiti art in the tunnels of provincial train stations.
"In Switzerland, it's a popular pastime to take trains from town to town, and as you approach the station, there's a lot of graffiti on the tunnel walls. I was captivated by it. I didn't know any girls who were doing it back then. I started a few years later. My first tag was just my name, a tag - it was terrible. But I was persistent."