KATHARINA GROSSE: I SET OUT, I WALKED FAST
WHITE CUBE presents I set out, I walked Fast, the first major UK exhibition to fully encompass the breadth and scale of Grosse’s approach to the medium.
22 April – 31 May, 2026
I Set Out, I Walked Fast is Rather than a retrospective or chronological survey, it offers what the artist describes as a ‘poly-perspectival’ view of her practice. Situating individual works within a wider referential ecosystem, it maps the ways in which Grosse has continually developed and reconfigured what painting can be.
For more than three decades, Katharina Grosse has radically reshaped the terrain of painting. For Grosse, painting does not belong to, in or on any particular surface; rather, it is a temporary ecology in which artist, site and viewer converge. In her practice, colour moves freely between canvas, architecture and ground, clinging to the contours of the physical world. ‘Painting’, the artist notes, ‘has such an independence from space. As such, it’s a proposal for a world manifested in a realm of reality that’s very hard to pin down’.
Since the late 1990s, Grosse has primarily worked with acrylic pigments and an industrial spray gun, creating marks that register not only the image, but also the movement of her body as she makes it. The spray gun allows her to extend her body beyond its reach, as far as her eyes can see. In this way she proposes a correlation between the act of looking and the act of painting, an approach informed, in part, by her early exposure to street shows and experimental theatre – productions that dismantled the traditional division between stage and audience. An interest in spatialisation and performance has also shaped Grosse’s understanding of time as non-chronological: ‘it’s not continuity that I’m fascinated by’, she attests, but rather a ‘vertical’ process, whereby new ideas that emerge from the painting process influence ‘what you’ve done and what you will do, in both directions’.
Ideas of time pervade the arrangement of the exhibition and its title, ‘I Set Out, I Walked Fast’, which is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Re-reading the novel while working in her New Zealand studio, Grosse was struck by Jane’s continuous movement and action as a woman of her time, noting that merely by walking she propels the story forward. Similarly, the exhibition brings together paintings from different periods of Grosse’s practice into a single, interconnected environment, allowing her to traverse swathes of time and register change: an effect that ‘almost repaints’ the works. Across the three spaces of the gallery, each work functions as a ‘plot’ point or ‘node within a spider’s web’ that constantly ‘generates new strands of activity’. In some cases, this process is made literal: canvases painted in previous in-situ installations are brought into the exhibition, carrying ‘the structure and thought of that past show’ with them.