Bringing together new and archival works, and a large-scale, in-situ installation, I Set Out, I Walked Fast is the first major UK exhibition to fully encompass the breadth and scale of Grosse’s approach to the medium. Rather than a retrospective or chronological survey, it offers what the artist describes as a ‘poly-perspectival’ view of her practice. Situating individual works within a wider referential ecosystem, it maps the ways in which Grosse has continually developed and reconfigured what painting can be.

Since the late 1990s, Grosse has primarily worked with acrylic pigments and an industrial spray gun, creating marks that register not only the image, but also the movement of her body as she makes it. The spray gun allows her to extend her body beyond its reach, as far as her eyes can see. In this way she proposes a correlation between the act of looking and the act of painting, an approach informed, in part, by her early exposure to street shows and experimental theatre – productions that dismantled the traditional division between stage and audience. An interest in spatialisation and performance has also shaped Grosse’s understanding of time as non-chronological: ‘it’s not continuity that I’m fascinated by’, she attests, but rather a ‘vertical’ process, whereby new ideas that emerge from the painting process influence ‘what you’ve done and what you will do, in both directions’.

Ideas of time pervade the arrangement of the exhibition and its title, ‘I Set Out, I Walked Fast’, which is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Re-reading the novel while working in her New Zealand studio, Grosse was struck by Jane’s continuous movement and action as a woman of her time, noting that merely by walking she propels the story forward. Similarly, the exhibition brings together paintings from different periods of Grosse’s practice into a single, interconnected environment, allowing her to traverse swathes of time and register change: an effect that ‘almost repaints’ the works. Across the three spaces of the gallery, each work functions as a ‘plot’ point or ‘node within a spider’s web’ that constantly ‘generates new strands of activity’. In some cases, this process is made literal: canvases painted in previous in-situ installations are brought into the exhibition, carrying ‘the structure and thought of that past show’ with them.

In the North Gallery, a vast in-situ installation comprises mounds of earth, a partially submerged canvas and a bronze-cast sculpture, all painted to create one work. As in her earlier installations that interpolate natural elements into the gallery space, paint is an ‘unexpected guest’ that extends across the uneven, unpredictable terrain, moving over and between elements without distinction. Passages of vivid colour unite the space by overwriting it, but rather than annihilating what Grosse refers to as ‘the given’, they de-stabilise these components while allowing them to remain legible. Whether applied to canvas or architecture, colour is not descriptive or symbolic; for Grosse, it does not signify anything beyond itself. Instead, colour is treated as a transformative force that acts directly upon perception, disrupting how visitors feel and experience space.

In 9x9x9, a series of new paintings made in Grosse’s New Zealand studio extend tenets of the artist’s unique way of thinking. Impacted as they were by dramatic atmospheric changes in her surroundings, where she worked in isolation on a cliff by the sea, the artist reflects: ‘it is elemental – rain, burning sun and gale force winds. I am unwatched. I can put myself together again’. Resembling luminous knots, each painting measures over two metres in height, and is split down the middle. The artist covers one half while painting the other, before reversing the process and moving back and forth to create a ‘soft edge’ between the two. As she explains, ‘It’s hard to negotiate seeing both parts at the same time’. Grosse describes these works as ‘direct’ and ‘unfiltered’, becoming ‘a site rather than a pictorial space’.

In the South Gallery, selected works from the artist’s archive include large, panoramic formats Grosse refers to as ‘landscapes’, some of which have never been exhibited. Here, the artist’s canvases – whether created 15 years apart or repurposed from previous projects – are ‘synchronised’ in one room, their visual ruptures and divergences finding renewed coherence. The ‘Untitled’ paintings from 2015 demonstrate Grosse’s deft use of stencils and masking, techniques which she first began incorporating into her practice in the 2010s. In them, sections of canvas have been covered throughout the painting process to produce a hard edge, one that has been subsequently trespassed by tendril-like drips and the haze of overspray. Elsewhere, Grosse creates more diffuse edges or delivers a crisp, clean delineation between untouched and painted areas. The edge – whether a device of the pictorial, or that which delimits the canvas – has always been, in the artist’s words, ‘an invitation for change’.

Treating the act of painting as an open, generative system, rather than one that follows a predetermined structure, Grosse’s exhibition ‘I Set Out, I Walked Fast’ privileges feeling, space and ongoing transformation. In it, works have been made in different periods of her life, under different conditions, and on different surfaces and planes, and yet remain in constant negotiation with one another, creating ‘an interference within the work itself’. For Grosse, paint is an autonomous, non-referential medium, one granted ‘a sense of independence, of freedom’. As the literary fragment ‘I Set Out, I Walked Fast’ suggests, Grosse’s interest is in the experience of life as it is lived, and can be lived, by anyone – a ‘dynamic relationship to vitality and to being ready to encounter whatever is there’.