For more than three decades, Katharina Grosse has radically reshaped the terrain of painting. In her work, vibrant colour spreads across interiors, architecture and landscapes, as well as canvases and sculptural surfaces, transforming the painted image into a multisensory experience that unsettles our perception of reality. For the artist, painting does not belong to, in or on any particular surface; rather, it is a temporary ecology in which artist, site and viewer converge. Since the late 1990s, Grosse has primarily worked with an industrial spray gun and acrylic pigments to explore how painting collides with the world. Her choice of tool proposes a correlation between the act of looking and the act of painting, with marks that register not only the image but also the movement of the body that creates it. Whether sprayed across her own bed, a dilapidated building, mounds of earth, gallery walls or canvas, these trails and traces of colour appear to be almost induced by the gaze itself. The spray gun colours everything it reaches, passing over obstacles and surfaces without hesitation or interruption, allowing her to take on vast spaces with a singular velocity. As the artist herself has said: ‘Imagination doesn’t have a scale.’
For Grosse, colour is not an aesthetic effect but a lens through which to perceive the world differently – like ‘a hot iron applied to invisible ink’. In 1998, she created Untitled (green corner) by painting directly onto the architecture of the Kunsthalle Bern. Her earlier wall paintings, made with a brush, were informed by a period spent in Florence, where she became fascinated by the inseparability of fresco painting from everyday life and architecture. For Untitled (green corner), she turned to a compressed-air spray gun for the first time, drawn to its speed and reach. A concentrated field of dark green appears to hover across the junction of two walls, transforming the recess into an active pictorial realm. This work inaugurated what has since become Grosse’s signature method and approach, in which the spray-painted image operates as a membrane or threshold ‘between imagination and the physical reality of our life’.
Shortly thereafter and into the early 2000s, Grosse expanded the dense planes of these early works, freeing them from the constraints of any single viewpoint. In Cheese Gone Bad (1999), created for Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, an ominous cloud of red and yellow, with spots of decay-green, appeared to gather in the edge where wall meets ceiling. Viewed through the panoramic windows of the Chinati’s desert-bound single-storey building, Cheese Gone Bad suggested an evanescence as transient as daylight or smell. In Das Bett (2004) Grosse shifted her focus to the private realm and decided to ‘inflict’ paint upon her own bedroom in Düsseldorf, presenting the finished work to only a handful of people. Das Bett showed the artist’s belongings simultaneously destroyed and intact: recognisable and functional yet transformed entirely through their translation into painted forms. A decade later, in Rockaway (2016), Grosse sprayed a derelict, former army building in the Rockaways in Queens, New York, with fluid bands of red, magenta and white. Whereas Das Bett overwhelmed the familiar and domestic, Rockaway animated the forsaken, using the painted image to revalorise a structure left to ruin.
Grosse’s studio practice, which encompasses canvases and three-dimensional works, is similarly driven by what she calls an ‘unruly impulse to take over space with painting, to trespass’. Within her canvases, often imposing in scale, the painted image spills beyond the edge of the frame, rebelling against its confines. She conceives of the relationship between her canvases and in-situ work as dialogic, rather than hierarchical, comparing it to ‘the difference between swimming in a pool and swimming in the sea’ or to composing a short story versus a novel. This ongoing dialogue was examined in ‘Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022’, a major survey exhibition covering three decades of work that opened at the Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, in 2022 before travelling to Kunstmuseum Bern and Kunstmuseum Bonn. The exhibition traced the evolution of Grosse’s studio practice and her sustained engagement with questions of perception, colour, space and the limits of painting.
Having started out creating landscape painting ‘exposed’ to the elements like wind or rain en plein air, Grosse embraces the unpredictability of environmental ‘interferences’, creating works that bristle with bodily sensation and emotional charge. Both her canvases and in-situ works seek to bring painting close to the viewer – to stage an encounter that is as visceral and physical as it is visual. On canvas, Grosse counters the evenness of the surface by introducing breaks and interruptions through stencils and masking, a strategy that also appears in some of her in-situ paintings, notably This Drove My Mother Up the Wall (2017) at South London Gallery, in which the resulting negative space became the focal point of the composition.
The interplay between her canvas and in-situ works is also evident, for example, in The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped (2018) at Carriageworks, Sydney, in which 8,000 square metres of painted fabric were draped and knotted in response to the industrial architecture of the venue. Grosse described the work as ‘crumpling a canvas into space’, its vast folds clinging to the building like a second skin that both conceals and reveals the structure beneath. A similar logic of expansion and permeability underpinned CHOIR (2025), her commission for Basel’s Messeplatz, the public square at the heart of the city’s trade-fair district. Grosse covered the plaza in sweeping strokes of magenta – a pigment chosen for its high visibility – which ran across the ground, clock tower, water fountain and fair logo, inserting ‘a painting surface between the feet and the surface of reality’. At the gateway to Art Basel, the world’s largest art fair, CHOIR existed for only seven days; the work could not be bought, sold or possessed, exceeding, and perhaps even questioning, the commercial structures that configured its surroundings.
For Grosse, painting ‘can create an amalgamation of past, present and future’. The artist’s awareness of time and gesture stems, in part, from her early exposure to street performance and introduction to experimental theatre. As a student, she encountered the work of Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Brook, whose productions dismantled the traditional division between stage and audience. Their use of space as something mobile and participatory resonates with Grosse’s approach to painting, which understands the painterly act as performance, production and output. Grosse’s work reveals both a tension with and reliance upon that which surrounds it: ‘They disturb one another’, she observes, and yet ‘like leaning cards – if you take one away, the other falls’. Inspired and sustained by the paradox between control and contingency, action and environment, Grosse keeps painting alive, in a continual negotiation with the world.
Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany and lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, with exhibitions and major projects at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany (2025); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2025); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2024); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (2020); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2018); MoMA PS1, Fort Tilden, Queens, New York (2016); South London Gallery, UK (2017); Venice Biennale, Italy (2015); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2013); De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2013); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2011); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2008); De Appel, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2005); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2002); and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2001).
In-situ and public projects include CHOIR (Art Basel Messeplatz Project, Switzerland, 2025); bLINK (Public Art Agency Sweden, Gothenburg, 2025); Canyon (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, 2022); psychylustro (Philadelphia Mural Arts Project, 2014); and Just Two of Us (Downtown Brooklyn Plaza, New York, 2013).
