White Cube has announced that it will represent Katharina Grosse, the German artist whose explosive use of colour has long defied the limits of both canvas and convention. Grosse, born in Freiburg in 1961, will now be jointly represented by White Cube, Gagosian, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Galerie nächst St. Stephan — an alliance that brings together some of the most prominent contemporary art powerhouses.
Her arrival marks a homecoming of sorts. Grosse first exhibited with White Cube back in 2002 at its Hoxton Square gallery — a time when her large-scale, site-specific installations were beginning to challenge the vocabulary of painting. She will open a major solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey in April 2026, preceded by a new painting debuting at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach this December.
Over the course of more than three decades, Grosse has transformed painting into an act of spatial rebellion. Armed with an industrial spray gun, she has blasted pigment across walls, ceilings, dunes, buildings — anything that gets in her way. Her approach collapses distinctions between painting, architecture and performance. As she’s put it, painting “doesn’t belong on a surface — it’s a situation,” one that envelops artist and viewer alike.
Her earliest in-situ works, such as Untitled (green corner) at Kunsthalle Bern in 1998, already carried this sense of spatial dislocation — colour that seems to lift off the wall and hang in the air. Later came Das Bett (2004), where she turned her own bedroom into a glowing, paint-soaked installation, and Rockaway (2016), which transformed an abandoned military building on the New York shoreline into something halfway between ruin and revelation.
Her monumental 2025 Art Basel commission, CHOIR, painted directly onto Basel’s Messeplatz, pushed that logic further — magenta brushstrokes sweeping across the plaza’s clock tower, fountain and fair signage in a single, defiant gesture. It was the first time the Art Basel public project had ever taken the form of a painting.
Grosse’s studio works are no less confrontational. Even her canvases feel like fragments ripped from some larger, uncontrollable force — eruptions of colour that seem to trespass into the room. Her goal, as she often says, is to make painting something you physically inhabit, “a time capsule that takes you out of the logic of consequence or beginning.”
This year, her solo exhibition, The Sprayed Dear, is on view at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 11, 2026), to be followed by Black Bed at MUNCH, Oslo, later that year. Her work also appears in Making Their Mark, curated by Cecilia Alemani, at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, and in The Scharf Collection at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie.