In the moment when the sun crosses the horizon, there is an instant where you can see the miracle of the Newton spectrum, every colour from green to pink.

(Katharina Grosse, 2025)

Galerie Max Hetzler, London, is pleased to present Point rock, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Katharina Grosse. This is the artist’s first presentation in the gallery’s London space.

The exhibition presents a new body of watercolour and acrylic works on paper, initiated by the artist in December 2024 during an extended stay in Marfa, Texas. A response to the fleeting brilliance of the desert sky at sunrise and sunset, Grosse’s new works depict entangled clusters of colour set against bright white grounds. Paper is an important medium in the artist’s practice and one she has returned to in varying formats and at varying scales throughout her career, from architectural to more compact propositions. These paintings sit along a continuum with Grosse’s large-scale in situ pieces such as Choir, her celebrated 2025 Art Basel Messeplatz commission, mapping the extremes of her thinking about how and where painting can land.

Grosse is fascinated by the way the painted image captures, condenses and contorts time. While making and viewing her large-scale works is a durational experience, the fluid brushstrokes of her new watercolours feel spontaneous and immediate. Snaking tendrils, looping brushmarks, and sweeps of paint billow across the pictorial plane in vibrant hues that shift through yellow, orange, pink and red to deeper shades of blue and green. In several works, new colours emerge in shadowy tones of purple and brown. Formed from the interaction of overlapping layers of paint, they at once reveal and obscure the sequential order of mark-making, blending and blurring in a way that speaks to the ever-changing desert skies. As the artist notes: ‘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.’

At the heart of Grosse’s practice is the idea of the painted image as a membrane or threshold between imagination and the physical world. Her residency at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, in 1999, which resulted in her landmark site-specific installation Cheese gone bad, was a dramatic early exploration of this interaction. Influenced by the seemingly limitless horizons of the Texan desert, Grosse saturated the walls, ceilings and doors of the foundation’s shopfront building with sprayed clouds of colour, transforming the space into a single engulfing image. Returning to Marfa for her latest series, Grosse remains radically open to the landscape and the particular way time unfolds there. ‘I’m interested in how a painting can communicate speed, the passing of an instant, and also hold a multiplicity of moments within a single image, so that they are impossible to disentangle,’ she states. Looping and knotting, these new works contain both end points and new beginnings.