PRESENTATION:Katharina Grosse-I Set Out, I Walked Fast

For more than three decades, Katharina Grosse has radically reshaped the terrain of painting. In her work, vibrant colour ​​spreads across interiors, architecture and landscapes, as well as canvases and sculptural surfaces, transforming the painted image into a multisensory experience that unsettles our perception of reality. For the artist, painting does not belong to, in or on any particular surface; rather, it is a temporary ecology in which artist, site and viewer converge.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive

The visceral, electrifying presence of Katharina Grosse—one of contemporary art’s most audacious colorists— has returned to London with a landmark exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey. “I Set Out, I Walked Fast” is the German artist’s first major UK presentation in nearly a decade, and her most ambitious to date, completely engulfing the cavernous gallery spaces in a vibrant, polyphonic dialogue of paint.

But this is no tidy survey or chronological retrospect. Instead, Grosse curates what she calls a ‘poly-perspectival’ view of her own practice—a living, interconnected ecosystem of archival pieces, new studio works, and a monumental in-situ installation. Spread across the gallery’s three vast halls, canvases from different moments in her career become ‘plot points’ or ‘nodes,’ generating new meaning as they ‘almost repaint’ one another through their proximity.

This sense of propulsive, non-linear motion is captured perfectly in the title, lifted from Charlotte Brontë’s *Jane Eyre*. Rereading the novel while isolated in her New Zealand studio, Grosse recognized Jane’s quiet defiance: simply by walking, she pushes the narrative forward. Similarly, the exhibition’s structure moves sideways, creating what Grosse views as a ‘vertical’ process where the present influences the past as much as the future. Works made years or even decades apart become equal partners in a perpetual, unfolding conversation.

At the heart of this conversation is Grosse’s signature instrument: the industrial spray gun. Since the late 1990s, she has jettisoned the traditional brush for this pneumatic tool, a choice that is profoundly conceptual. The spray gun extends her arm, allowing her to paint as far as her eye can see. The resulting marks register not just color, but the physical exertion, the sweep, and the velocity of her body. Informed by early encounters with experimental theater that erased the line between audience and stage, Grosse’s method dissolves the barrier between the artist’s command and the viewer’s experience.

This liberation is given monumental form in the North Gallery, where a vast, immersive installation of earth mounds, a partially submerged canvas, and a cast bronze sculpture create a single, sprawling tableau. Color is an ‘unexpected guest’ here, sprayed indiscriminately across dirt, fabric, and metal. It doesn’t merely decorate or describe—it intervenes. This is color as ‘a hot iron applied to invisible ink,’ in the artist’s words. It is a transformative, non-referential force, disorienting our spatial perception and reminding us that Grosse’s paint has a fierce, thrilling independence.

Yet, for all its monumental scale, a raw intimacy is present in the new works from her New Zealand series, “9x9x9”. Conceived in a coastal studio battered by gale-force winds and burning sun, these towering paintings are split down the middle. After covering one half, Grosse reverses the process to create a delicate ‘soft edge’ where the two sides meet. The environment of radical isolation and elemental forces has seeped into the canvas. The result is, as Grosse describes it, a direct, unfiltered ‘site rather than a pictorial space’—paint as a living, breathing terrain rather than a mere illusion.

“I Set Out, I Walked Fast” is an argument for the radical, life-affirming potential of a medium often declared obsolete. For Grosse, painting is not a method of representation, but a mode of encounter—a dynamic, open system that privileges feeling over formula. Stepping into White Cube, you are not simply viewing art. You are walking, scrambling, and getting lost in a chromatic field of pure vitality, one that invites you to be ready for whatever comes next.

Photo: Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2026, Acrylic, bronze, canvas, puddle clay, Dimensions variable, © Katharina Grosse, Courtesy the artist and White Cube Gallery

Info: White Cube Bermondsey, 144–152 Bermondsey Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 22/4-31/5/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com/