Katharina Grosse Black Bed

The German artist Katharina Grosse is known for breaking the frame of traditional painting. In her work, painting can appear anywhere – a canvas, a public square, by the side of a railway track, on a sandy beach – transforming nature, architecture, and especially the viewer, into part of the artwork. Using a spray gun allows her to paint quickly and responsively across surfaces and scales, giving her work a flowing, almost liquid quality.

Grosse has drawn inspiration from Edvard Munch since her student days, notably his monumental painting The Sun (1912–13), in which a dazzling sun rises over a rocky archipelago. In preparation for this exhibition, she will spend time working in Munch’s studio at Ekely in Oslo, creating new works that add another dimension to the dialogue between the two artists.

The exhibition title is taken from Black Bed, a newly produced installation that reimagines one of Grosse’s seminal pieces, Das Bett (2004), in which the artist spray-painted her bedroom in Düsseldorf, along with her furniture, clothes and belongings, destroying them in the process of making the work. Das Bett marked a turning point, incorporating, for the first time, symbolic and narrative elements that expanded her understanding of paint’s transformative possibilities. Grosse describes Black Bed as connecting the exhibition to the emotional and psychological themes of life and death in Munch’s work. As a dark counterpart to The Sun, Black Bed envelops the exhibition space in its unsettling energy.