You enter Katharina Grosse’s I Set Out, I Walked Fast at White Cube Bermondsey expecting scale. The gallery’s industrial footprint certainly has enough of it to accommodate Grosse’s sprawling ambitions, housing her enormous canvases, painted environments and an earthwork installation that appears to have burst through the floor of the North Gallery. What catches you off guard, though, is not the size but the texture.
Spray paint hangs over everything in soft layers. A fine particulate haze is settled over soil, bronze, canvas and wall with equal insistence.
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Colour and movement
For more than three decades, Grosse has treated painting as something that can move freely through space rather than remain confined to a canvas. Since the late 1990s, she has used industrial spray guns to coat buildings, landscapes and interiors in dense sweeps of colour.
The resulting marks act as a physical record of her movement, capturing the exact speed of her stride and the sweep of her arm. The breakthrough came in 1998, when she sprayed a corner of Kunsthalle Bern dark green, extending paint directly onto architecture for the first time. Compared with the monumental works that followed, the gesture now seems oddly restrained.
I Set Out, I Walked Fast aims to offer what Grosse describes as a ‘poly-perspectival’ view of the last 20 years of her practice, giving as much space to studio paintings as to the immersive installations for which she is best known. That balance works in the show’s favour.
The large-scale environments provide the immediate impact, but the paintings reveal the underlying discipline that keeps the work from collapsing into spectacle.
Revealing materials
The North Gallery installation dominates the exhibition. An enormous stretched canvas lies partially buried beneath a mound of earth that rises and dips across the room. Stray clumps of dirt scatter across the vinyl-covered floor beyond it.
Near the entrance, a jagged bronze form presses low against the edge of the space, awkward and slightly threatening. Everything has been coated in overlapping layers of yellow, pink, green, orange, blue and black spray paint, as though colour has drifted indiscriminately across the room and settled where it could.
There is an undeniable theatricality to it. You can easily imagine the performance that produced the work – Grosse in protective overalls moving through the gallery with a compressor-driven spray gun, releasing clouds of pigment over earth and canvas alike.
Yet the installation avoids becoming immersive in the easy, Instagram-friendly sense. The soil still looks heavy and damp beneath the paint. The bronze object remains stubbornly industrial. Even the brightest passages of colour cannot entirely smooth over the roughness of the materials underneath.
Control and excess
The paintings in the South Gallery sharpen that tension between control and excess. A panoramic nine-metre-wide canvas from 2005 stretches across one wall. The overlapping sections of painterly activity faintly resemble a map or garden plan viewed from above.
Elsewhere, colour gathers into soft atmospheric clouds before collapsing into drips and dense ribbons of pigment. Up close, the surfaces of these works become unexpectedly intricate: speckled overspray, masked shapes, thin veils of colour layered over older marks.
The white spaces matter as much as the paint. Grosse often masks parts of the canvas before spraying, leaving behind hard-edged voids once the coverings are removed. These blank passages interrupt the visual noise throughout the exhibition.
Some resemble missing fragments; others cut sharply through the compositions like sudden shafts of light. They stop the work becoming overwhelming. More importantly, they reveal how constructed these apparently spontaneous paintings really are.
Concentrated colour
The gallery’s large central room contains her newest works, made in New Zealand while the artist was working in relative isolation in a cliffside studio. Smaller in scale and split vertically down the middle, they feel more concentrated than the earlier canvases. One side is painted while the other remains covered, before the process is reversed.
The resulting seam that runs through each work never quite settles. Colours push against one another without fully blending, creating a persistent visual tension born from elemental isolation.
Stepping back into the stark white spine of the main corridor afterward, the gallery walls look oddly flat. Grosse’s achievement is not simply that she expands painting into space, but that she makes space itself feel temporarily unstable. Few artists can work at this scale without losing precision. Fewer still can make such excess feel this controlled.
