Katharina Grosse
I Set Out, I Walked Fast
White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK
22 April – 31 May 2026
To enter Katharina Grosse‘s exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey is to relinquish the familiar restraint of that space for something visceral and immediate. You are bathed in high-frequency pigments, crossing a threshold where the distance between eye and canvas ceases to exist. This is not a show of paintings. It is a confrontation with colour as a physical force.
Since the late 1990s, Grosse has worked primarily with acrylic pigments and an industrial spray gun, extending her practice far beyond the canvas into abandoned buildings, public gardens and seashores.
Informed by an early period in Florence, where the artist became fascinated by the inseparability of fresco painting from daily life and architecture, she has become a defining figure in the convergence of painting and land art on the international circuit.
The exhibition title is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Re-reading the novel in her New Zealand studio, Grosse was struck by Jane’s continuous forward motion, and how simply walking propels the entire story. The show takes that as its structural logic, bringing together paintings from different periods into a single, interconnected environment that, in her words, “almost repaints” the works.
The spray gun is central to Grosse’s visual language. It extends her body beyond its physical reach, registering not just image but movement, and proposing a direct correlation between looking and making.
She has cited early exposure to street performance and experimental theatre as a formative influence: productions that dismantled the boundary between stage and audience. Her understanding of time follows a similar logic, non-linear and vertical, in which new ideas act back upon what came before and what will follow.
In the South Gallery, the large-scale “landscapes” demonstrate her mastery of stencil and masking techniques developed from the 2010s onward. These are the works with the most visceral impact. By bringing painting into immediate proximity with the body, they bypass the logical and operate closer to the subconscious.
For Grosse, colour is neither descriptive nor symbolic. It functions as a transformative force that acts upon perception, altering how a space is felt rather than simply seen.
The North Gallery’s in-situ installation, the most circulated image from this exhibition on social media, piles colour directly onto the floor alongside mounds of earth and a bronze cast sculpture. The richness of texture is undeniable, though this room was the least affecting for me personally.
The Art Berries is particularly drawn to practices that interrogate how we inhabit the world. Grosse’s work does not sit squarely within that premise, yet her contribution remains significant and valid. She reframes painting as a catalyst of emotional perception, operating as a true activist of the medium itself.
As part of The Art Berries’ Encounters series, Art Blueberry performed alongside several of the large canvases in response to the energy they project. This engagement, joined by her children, is shaped by the same spatial and performative instincts that Grosse herself has cited as foundational to her work: an intuitive way of inhabiting art that reinforces the belief in a shared experience across generations.
Leave a Reply