An Art That Can Go Everywhere

I Set Out, I Walked Fast isn’t a reinvention of the wheel for Katharina Grosse, who for decades has been building an infrastructure of what a painting can be and mean. Entering a Grosse installation is like stepping into an psychedelic, post-apocalyptic forest where color has taken on a life of its own. Her spray-painted environments transform ordinary spaces into otherworldly landscapes, where vibrant pigments cascade across walls, floors, and objects like digital aurora bleeding into reality. The new show at White Cube in London is an ecosystem of color that bleeds onto the floor, the walls, but with a chaos contained onto canvases that feels like a major capture of energy.

The installation becomes about a bodily exploration; viewers must navigate through corridors of magenta, valleys of electric blue, and clearings of sulfur yellow. The scale overwhelms and embraces simultaneously, creating intimate moments within vast chromatic territories. Each step reveals new color relationships, shadows, and luminous surprises—a living, breathing “forest” where pigment replaces leaves and wonder grows on every surface.

There is something I find remarkable in reading about Grosse, after all these years of admiring the work. She noted about I Walked Fast, “Painting 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.” More experiences with art should read this way: hard to pin down. Uncontainable. This may be the German artist’s first solo with White Cube, but it feels like a match-making exercise that is flawless. A space to break some boundaries. —Evan Pricco