Now on view in London, I Set Out, I Walked Fast by Katharina Grosse occupies White Cube from April 22nd to May 31st, 2026, marking her most expansive presentation in the UK to date. Bringing together new works, archival pieces, and a monumental in-situ installation, the exhibition traces a practice that pushes painting beyond the canvas into lived space.
Rather than following chronology, the works are arranged as a continuous environment, where colour and perception remain in constant exchange. Grosse treats painting as a fluid system—restless, open, and spatial.
A landscape of colour in motion
In the North Gallery, a large-scale installation binds mounds of earth, a partially submerged canvas, and a bronze sculpture into a single painted terrain. Colour travels across surfaces without hierarchy, holding each element in tension while preserving its material weight. Painting here slips free from the surface, spreading across ground and architecture.
Since the late 1990s, Grosse has worked with sprayed acrylic pigment, extending the gesture of the body through an industrial tool. The mark carries through space, linking movement, vision, and making it into one continuous act.
The 9x9x9 series, produced in New Zealand, introduces a quieter rhythm: divided canvases with shifting edges that resist fixed perception. These works operate as fragments—moments of instability within a larger spatial field.
In the South Gallery, earlier works sit alongside recent paintings, where masking, drips, and overspray interrupt and destabilise the image. Edges blur, collide, and reassert themselves, creating a dialogue across time.
Throughout the exhibition, painting is revealed as a constantly changing state—more like an environment than an object—influenced by movement, proximity and the ever-changing brightness of colour.
Courtesy of WHITE CUBE
