Galerie Max Hetzler, London presents Point Rock, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Katharina Grosse, marking the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery’s London space.
Developed during an extended stay in Marfa, Texas in late 2024, the new body of watercolour and acrylic works responds to the fleeting intensity of the desert sky at sunrise and sunset. Set against bright white grounds, tangled clusters of colour unfold in looping, billowing gestures that shift from yellow and orange to pink, red, blue and green — with shadowy purples and browns emerging where layers overlap.
Paper has long been central to Grosse’s practice, a medium she returns to across scales, from architectural interventions to intimate works like these. The new paintings sit in dialogue with her large-scale, in situ projects, including CHOIR, her 2025 Art Basel Messeplatz commission, mapping the extremes of how and where painting can exist.
At the core of Grosse’s work is a fascination with time: how it can be compressed, stretched and folded into a single image. Where her immersive installations unfold through duration, these works feel instantaneous — fluid brushstrokes capturing moments that appear to materialise and dissolve at once. As she reflects, “In the desert, every day and every night, you actually see time pass because the changing light transforms everything you look at. It has a dematerialising effect, and the transformation is almost instantaneous. These paintings are my response to that phenomenon, which is absolutely ephemeral and yet repeats itself every day.”
That tension between the fleeting and the continuous runs through Point Rock. Grosse has long treated painting as a threshold between imagination and the physical world, a sensibility shaped in part by her 1999 residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, where her landmark installation Cheese Gone Bad transformed an entire building into a single, immersive field of colour. Returning to the same landscape more than two decades later, her new works remain radically open — holding multiple moments, endings and beginnings within a single, luminous surface.
KATHARINA GROSSE Point Rock, 15th January – 28th February 2026 Galerie Max Hetzler
Art Opening: Thursday, 15th January, 6PM – 8PM
Katharina Grosse’s work will be presented in dialogue with Edvard Munch at MUNCH, Oslo, opening September 2026.
About the artist
Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) lives and works between Berlin and Aotearoa New Zealand. Grosse’s recent installations include CHOIR at Messeplatz, Basel; and bLINK at The West Link, Gothenburg (both 2025). The artist’s work has been the subject of recent institutional solo exhibitions at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2025–2026); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2025); Centre Pompidou-Metz (2024–2025); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024); Kunstmuseum Bern; Albertina, Vienna (both 2023); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022); Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice (collateral event of 59th Venice Biennale, 2022); HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2021); Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2020–2021); Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (duo show); chi K11 art space, Guangzhou (both 2019); Carriageworks, Sydney; National Gallery Prague; chi K11 art museum, Shanghai (all 2018); ARoS Triennial, Aarhus; South London Gallery (both 2017); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden; MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! programme, Fort Tilden, New York (both 2016); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Museum Wiesbaden (both 2015); and Mural Arts Program Philadelphia (2014), among others.
Grosse’s works are in the public collections of Albertina, Vienna; Baltimore Museum of Art; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunsthaus Zürich; Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum Azman, Jakarta; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Saarland Museum – Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, among many others.
