Katharina Grosse valuation
Paints with an industrial spray gun, over rooms, rubble, railway sidings and whole buildings.
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg in 1961 and has pushed painting off the canvas more thoroughly than almost anyone of her generation.
What a work by Katharina Grosse is worth
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Bio
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg in 1961 and has pushed painting off the canvas more thoroughly than almost anyone of her generation. Using industrial spray equipment she covers architecture, soil, furniture, fabric and landscape in fields of acrylic colour, so that a work is frequently a room or a site rather than an object — a condemned house on Rockaway Beach, a railway shed, the grounds of an exhibition. The canvases and works on paper are made with the same equipment and read as extracts from that larger practice.
Unique paintings on canvas are what reach the market, along with works on paper and a limited output of editions. Scale is the practical issue: these are frequently very large, and transport, installation and storage all cost real money that should be reckoned into a sale route before anything is consigned. The sprayed acrylic surface is thin and unvarnished, which makes it more vulnerable to abrasion than the size suggests. Gallery documentation is generally good and should travel with the work.
Münster, the bedroom and the commissions
Grosse studied at the Kunstakademie Münster from 1982 to 1986 and at Düsseldorf from 1986 to 1990, with residencies at the Villa Romana in Florence in 1992 and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 1999. In 2004 she sprayed the bedroom of her Düsseldorf flat, bed, clothes, books and shoes included. She taught at the Weißensee Academy in Berlin from 2000 to 2010 and was professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2010 to 2018.
Her commissions include Gate 122 at Toronto Pearson Airport in 2003 and a work for the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus of the German parliament in Berlin in 2015. She has been represented by Gagosian since 2017 and Galerie Max Hetzler since 2022.
The Ruhr, Rockaway and the Messeplatz
Grosse grew up in the Ruhr, the child of an artist mother and a linguist father, and after Münster and Düsseldorf took up residencies at the Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland in 2001 and the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2002. She has had a studio in Berlin's Moabit district since 2008, and others in Auckland and, since 2020, at Groß Kreutz. In 2015 she set three huge trees with paint-drenched roots in the neoclassical hall of the Museum Wiesbaden, and in 2016, for MoMA PS1, she sprayed an abandoned army bathhouse and the beach around it at Fort Tilden on the Rockaway peninsula.
Her public works include pieces for the Federal Labour Court in Erfurt in 1999, Seven Days Time at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2011, Blue Orange at Vara station in Sweden, designed in 2012, Just Two of Us at MetroTech Commons for the Public Art Fund in 2013, the Chlodwigplatz stop on the Cologne transport network in 2015, a mural for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2019 and the Messeplatz at Art Basel in 2025. She worked with Johann König until 2022, and since 2021 has chaired the board of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
