Artists Katharina Grosse

b.1961 Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Katharina Grosse is one of the most inventive and intriguing painters working today. Through a fusion of painting with architecture and sculpture, Grosse produces a physically immersive experience for the viewer, choosing to work directly onto walls and objects using an industrial spray gun.  Her spray-painted works enliven surfaces as vast and unorthodox as building exteriors, disused bunkers and massive dirt piles, as intimate as her own bed, bookshelves and clothing, as conventional as a stretched canvas or paper.  Her method draws from a combination of art historical traditions—from fresco, plein-air painting, Abstract Expressionism and street graffiti.

Colour is essential to Grosse and she achieves intense, visceral arrangements through careful blending and application of primary and secondary colours.  Each hue has the function of distinguishing between different movements and her extremely physical process of application is reflected within the pictorial space. 

Born and based in Germany, Grosse’s work has been commissioned by institutions around the world, including Amsterdam's De Appel, Paris' Palais de Tokyo, The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Brisbane. In 2017 Grosse had her first solo exhibition at Gagosian New York. 

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Katharina Grosse since 2004.

Education

2000 - 2010 Professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee
2010 - 2018 Professor at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf

selected exhibitions

View selected Curriculum Vitae

2022 Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us, HAM – Helsinki Art Museum, Finland

2021 Katharina Grosse: Repetitions Without Origin. Gagosian, Beverly Hills, CA.
From the Foam’s Fudged Edge, König Seoul, South Korea
Als mein Vater Sand war [When My Father Was Sand], Y8 Kunstraum + Yoga e.V., Hamburg, Germany

2020 It Wasn't Us, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany
Is It You?, The Baltimore Museum of Art, USA
Separatrix. Gagosian, Rome, Italy      

2019 Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA (forthcoming)
Frozen Gesture: Gesture in painting from Roy Lichtenstein to Katharina Grosse, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland
Mumbling Mud, chi K11 art space, Guangzhou, China

2018 Prototypes of Imagination, Gagosian, London, United Kingdom
Wunderbild, National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic
The Horse Trotted Another Couple Of Meters, Then It Stopped, Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia

2017 This Drove my Mother up the Wall, South London Gallery, London, United Kingdom

2016 Katharina Grosse, MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! series, New York, NY, USA
Katharina Grosse, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany

2015 Seven Hours, Eight Rooms, Three Trees, Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (including permanent indoor installation)
yes no why later, Garage – Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia The Smoking Kid, KÖNIG Galerie, Berlin, Germany