Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau) grew up in an academic household — her father Siegfried Grosse was a Germanist and later rector of Ruhr University Bochum — before studying under Norbert Tadeusz in Münster and Gotthard Graubner in Düsseldorf. Two very different experiences shaped what came next: a residency in Florence, where she became fascinated by how fresco painting was inseparable from the architecture and daily life around it, and time spent in Marseille in the 1990s, absorbing the speed and directness of graffiti culture.

Both influences converged in 1998, when Grosse picked up an industrial spray gun for the first time and sprayed a single deep-green corner of the Kunsthalle Bern — ceiling, two walls, no hesitation. Untitled (Green Corner) looks modest in retrospect, but it announced the method that would define her career: colour applied at distance from the hand, moving across whatever surface it meets without negotiating with it. "Imagination doesn't have a scale," she has said, and her subsequent work took her at her word — walls, floors, mounds of earth, entire building façades, even her own furnished bedroom, sprayed over completely in Das Bett (2004).

Grosse taught as professor at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee from 2000 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2010 to 2018, shaping a generation of German painters while continuing to expand her own practice into monumental public commissions, including the German Bundestag (2015) and Toronto Pearson Airport. She lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand.

Untitled (Green Corner) (1998), her breakthrough spray-gun work at the Kunsthalle Bern, remains the clearest demonstration of her method in its purest form — a single colour, applied fast, crossing the boundary between wall and ceiling as if the architecture had no say in the matter.

Das Bett (2004) took the same logic into a domestic register: Grosse sprayed over her own furnished bedroom — bed, sheets, furniture, walls — in a single continuous field of colour, collapsing the distinction between painting and lived space entirely.

Rockaway! (2016), a monumental installation on a derelict military building on New York's Rockaway peninsula, presented in partnership with MoMA PS1, extended her practice to landscape scale — proof that the same spray-gun logic developed on a single gallery corner could govern an entire structure exposed to open sky and ocean.

CHOIR (2025), her sprawling public commission covering the façade and Messeplatz of Art Basel, confirmed her continued position at the centre of large-scale spatial painting nearly three decades after her first spray-gun experiment.

Grosse's prints do not simplify her practice — they concentrate it. Working in screenprint and pigment print, she translates the same velocity and colour intensity that defines her architectural interventions onto a fixed, editioned surface, where the absence of real space forces the colour itself to carry the entire charge of the work.

Her editions circulate alongside a career built substantially outside the conventional gallery-and-canvas system — public commissions, textile installations, and site-specific works that by nature cannot be collected. For this reason, her prints and editions occupy a particular role: they are among the few forms in which her practice exists as a discrete, ownable object at all. Prices for signed prints generally range from the low to mid four figures, a considerably more accessible point of entry than her paintings, whose auction record stands at $565,677.

For collectors, Grosse's editions offer direct access to a painter who has spent three decades testing how far colour can travel before it stops being containable. Works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.