The paintings of Katharina Grosse can appear anywhere. Her large-scale works are multi-dimensional pictorial worlds in which walls, ceilings, objects, and even entire buildings and landscapes, are coated with splendid color. For the exhibition It Wasn’t Us, the artist has transformed the Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, as well as the outdoor space behind the building, into an expansive painting which radically destabilizes the existing order of the museum architecture.

The painting’s support consists of the floor of the hall and a group of polystyrene forms designed specifically for the exhibition, which Grosse transposed into their final size in several working stages and through incremental changes of scale. The painting stretches beyond the building’s confines and into public space, onto the vast grounds behind the museum, and across the façade of the Rieckhallen. It Wasn’t Us does not connect interior and exterior, museum and environment, or culture and nature. Rather, it renegotiates our viewing habits and our forms of thought and perception.

Katharina Grosse (*1961, Freiburg im Breisgau), one of the most profiled female painters on the international contemporary art scene, studied at the Kunstakademie Münster, as well as at the Düsseldorf Academy, where she was also a professor from 2010 to 2018. Her works have been seen in renowned museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2019), the National Gallery in Prague (2018), the chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018), and MoMA PS1 in New York (2016), and at several biennials and triennials, including Aarhus (2017), Venice (2015), and Curitiba (2013).

EXHIBITION: Hamburger Bahnhof –Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, June 14, 2020–January 01, 2021

Text by: Julia Eckert