Katharina Grosse | HIGH NOON LUMEN | Galerie Max Hetzler | 11.09.-01.11.2025

Widely known for her spectacular, immersive paintings in which explosive colour is sprayed directly onto buildings, interiors, landscapes and canvas, Grosse paints across different scales, surfaces and dimensions, disrupting our habitual way of ordering the world. Her paintings extend the visceral possibilities of the medium and reflect an ongoing exploration of colour, the body and perception in space. The use of a spray gun allows riotous colour to land clean on the surface and for the artist to scale her reach, responding reflexively to events and ideas that arise as she works.

For the paintings in this exhibition, Grosse uncharacteristically confined herself to a limited range of colours, using primarily orange and green. There is a particular tension between the two – the feverish intensity of the orange and the antagonistic pull of the dark green, with each disturbing the integrity of the other.

As Colin Lang writes in the text accompanying the exhibition: ‘When pressed against one another, these two colors have the uncanny effect of lifting the image off the canvas, suggesting a painting that hovers over its support as opposed to being wedded to it. Thus, Grosse seemingly drives a wedge between what appears on the surface of her paintings and the physical support beneath them.’

For Grosse, the canvas is one surface among a near-infinity of possibilities on which the painted image can land. Just as her large-scale in situ works continually test painting’s ‘go-anywhere’ power, appearing on water fountains, sand, grassy verges and glass facades, the unruly paintings on her newest canvases strain to break free.

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau) lives and works between Berlin and Aotearoa New Zealand. Her recent exhibitions, installations and on-site paintings include CHOIR at Messeplatz, Basel (2025); bLINK at The West Link, Gothenburg (2025); Wunderbild at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2025); The Sprayed Dear at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2025); Shifting the Stars at Centre Pompidou-Metz (2024–2025); Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions at Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024), Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022); Warum Drei Töne Kein Dreieck Bilden at Albertina, Vienna (2023); Canyon (permanent from 2022) and Splinter (2022) both at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Apollo, Apollo at Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice (collateral event of 59th Venice Biennale, 2022); Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us at HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2021); Shutter Splinter at Helsinki Biennial (2021); Is It You? at Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); It Wasn’t Us at Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart–Berlin (2020); the two-person show Mural: Jackson Pollock | Katharina Grosse at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019); chi K11 art space, Guangzhou (2019); The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Meters, Then It Stopped at Carriageworks, Sydney (2018); Wunderbild at National Gallery Prague (2018); Mumbling Mud at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai (2018); Asphalt Air and Hair at ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017); This Drove My Mother Up the Wall at South London Gallery (2017); Katharina Grosse at Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2016); Rockaway for MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! programme, Fort Tilden, New York (2016); yes no why later at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2015); Seven Hours, Eight Rooms, Three Trees at Museum Wiesbaden (2015); Untitled Trumpet for the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and psychylustro for Mural Arts Program Philadelphia (2014).

Grosse’s works are in the public collections of institutions including Albertina, Vienna; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Istanbul Modern; K21–Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe–Muzeul de Artă Recentă, Bucharest; MAXXI–Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum Azman, Jakarta; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Saarland Museum – Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, among others.