With Luxus Gross continues his examination of the possibility of a contemporary culture of painting as well as his grappling with bourgeois aesthetics. Whereas the cheap store-bought paintings reflect mass, petit-bourgeois tastes, the motifs of the Luxus series are oriented to the high end of the social ladder. This is about aesthetics as a social distinction, about status, but also about the extent to which painting, or art in general, is a luxury product and inevitably plays a role in producing social status. Incidentally, in this respect there are interesting parallels to the work of American artist Jeff Koons, who, like Gross, not only takes an interest in the Baroque and the Rococo, in kitsch and knick-knack motifs, but also works on the theme of luxury that characterized Western societies during the prosperous 1980s in his series of sculptures Luxury and Degradation (1986).

Something more solid and less intellectual happens in the Catering series. The gastronomic title apparently comes from the paper doilies used for decoration at buffets, where cakes, sweets, and so forth are placed on them – cheap imitations of crocheted or lace doilies. With the doilies, we again find ourselves amid the ambivalence of bourgeois aesthetics, oscillating between

decorative comfort and philistinism. What strikes us with Catering when we compare it to Luxus is the fact that the decorative systems, the patterns, stripes and grid forms that had previously remained in the background, now have more and more intrinsic value.