Katharina Grosse, who was born in Freiberg im Breisgau, Germany, in 1961, sees painting as an expansive field, which might be explored on canvas, but also directly on gallery walls, on vast textile hangings, on sculptures and natural forms like earth and trees brought into the gallery, as well as in public space and even directly onto the landscape.
Katharina Grosse with her work CHOIR (2025), the Messeplatz project for Art Basel 2025 Photo: Diana Pfammatter © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
Using an industrial spray gun, she sees colour as a material, and creates dense swaths of rich hues that form dazzling relationships and absorb and often surround the viewer. Whatever form her work takes, it clearly evokes Katharina’s choreography of gestures as well as representing a response to and creation of architectural space.
Katharina Grosse's Das Bett (2004) © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2025. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
Seeing painting as a medium that reflects and simultaneously articulates the world, Grosse invites an active response from her viewers, as much bodily as it is visual. She discusses how making her work immediately meets with “feedback” from the surfaces and environments in which she is acting, how she is “at home in flow” when working across multiple pieces, and how she employs colours as a cluster, always in relation to one another.
Katharina Grosse, 2024 © Photo: Franz Grünewald
Grosse reflects on the early impact of choreographer Pina Bausch; her residency at Edvard Munch’s former studio at Ekely in Norway; the physicality in the paint of Lovis Corinth; the “razor-sharp sentences” of the writer Annie Ernaux and her fascination with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; and the inspiring vision and “ecology” of the film-maker Agnes Varda. Plus, she gives insight into life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
• Katharina Grosse: Black Bed, MUNCH, Oslo, 26 September-31 December
This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture platform. Bloomberg Connects offers access to a vast range of international cultural organisations through a single click, with new guides being added regularly. They include several museums and galleries that have held major presentations of Katharina Grosse’s work, from the Kemper Art Museum, in St Louis, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the US, to, in Europe, the South London Gallery, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and MUNCH in Oslo, the location for Katharina’s major exhibition between September and December, 2026. On the MUNCH guide, you can take audio tours of the museum’s collection, with its remarkable range of paintings by Edvard Munch, including landmark works like The Scream, Puberty and Madonna. You can also hear in-depth discussion of the monumental paintings Munch made for the ceremonial hall of the University of Oslo, now in the museum, including The Sun, a source of inspiration for Katharina Grosse’s exhibition.
