Katharina Grosse

Overview

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau and grew up in the Ruhr region, the daughter of an artist mother and a linguist father. She studied at the Kunstakademie in Muenster and then at the Kunstakademie in Duesseldorf during the eighties, and she has lived and worked in Berlin since the turn of the century, with further studios in Auckland and in Gross Kreutz.

Grosse is the painter who took the brush out of painting. Since the late nineties she has worked with an industrial paint sprayer, laying prismatic bands of unmixed acrylic across whatever happens to be in front of the nozzle: canvas, but also walls, floors, soil, tree roots, heaps of earth, sheets of fabric and entire buildings. The method removes the trace of the hand and replaces it with an atmosphere of colour that has no obvious edge, so her work sits uneasily and deliberately between painting, sculpture and architecture. She once sprayed the bedroom of her own flat, bed and floor and the clothes and books strewn across it, in rainbow acrylic, and the logic of that gesture has scaled up ever since.

Career

Her commissions map the range. She painted Gate 122 of Terminal 1 at Toronto Pearson International Airport in 2003. Seven Days Time followed at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2011, and Just Two Of Us went up on the MetroTech Commons in New York for the Public Art Fund in 2013. In 2015 she installed three massive trees in the neoclassical hall of the Museum Wiesbaden with their paint drenched roots exposed, and completed a commission for the German parliament in Berlin. Rockaway in 2016, made with MoMA PS1, saw her spray an abandoned army bathhouse and part of the surrounding beach on the Rockaway peninsula. A mural for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston followed in 2019, and in 2025 she took on the Messeplatz at Art Basel with CHOIR.

She taught at the Weissensee Academy of Art and was later professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf. She chairs the board of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Her work is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and QAGOMA in Brisbane, among others, and she is represented by Gagosian and by Galerie Max Hetzler.

The market and the LLB lot

Grosse's large canvases are the top of her market. At Phillips in London a work titled Ohne Titel, acrylic on canvas and measuring 290 by 193 centimetres, made GBP 277,200 in 2021 at an evening sale. Prices at that level attach to unique, room scale paintings signed and numbered on the reverse in her studio sequence.

The lot LLB has offered is a print, catalogued as Untitled II, and it belongs to a quite separate part of her output. Editions by Grosse circulate at a small fraction of the canvas prices, which is why a low four figure hammer for a print is consistent with a painter whose unique work sells in the hundreds of thousands. Buyers should not read across from one to the other.

What to check before buying

With an artist whose signature effect is sprayed colour, the questions that matter are the physical ones. Establish whether a work is unique or an edition, and if an edition, its size and whether the sheet is signed and numbered. Sprayed and printed colour of this intensity is vulnerable to light, so ask about display history and fading, particularly in the reds and magentas that carry so much of her palette. Finally, check the support: Grosse works on canvas, paper, aluminium and fabric, and each behaves differently over time and prices differently in the room.