Katharina Grosse at White Cube Bermondsey
The show is called I Set Out, I Walked Fast, which is precisely what I did not do. I set out cautiously, paused for twenty minutes outside on Bermondsey Street wondering whether I’d remembered to put film in the camera (I hadn’t), then shuffled in behind a pair of people who appeared to know what poly-perspectival meant and were not afraid to say so at volume.
The camera in question was the Canon EOS-1N RS reviewed below, a professional film SLR of the mid-1990s that fires at up to ten frames per second and weighs roughly the same as a small child. I had brought it because it felt appropriately serious. Katharina Grosse, after all, is an artist who once spray-painted her entire bedroom in Düsseldorf — furniture, clothes and all. One should meet ambition with ambition. Or at least with a camera that predates Wi-Fi.
The exhibition brings together works spanning two decades, from 2005 through to new pieces made in 2026, and the effect of walking into the main space is not unlike walking into the inside of someone’s very confident dream. Colour is everywhere — vast, muscular, unapologetic. Grosse deploys her spray gun the way a conductor deploys a baton, except the baton is enormous and the orchestra has been replaced by architecture. Paint moves freely between canvas, architecture and ground, clinging to the contours of the physical world. A wall is not a wall. A floor is not a floor. Everything is a proposal.
Raising the EOS-1N RS, peering through the viewfinder, and promptly composing a shot that included someone’s elbow, half an exit sign, and what I think was a fire extinguisher. The camera’s space shuttle shutter, designed to reduce vibration at the moment of exposure, engaged with a satisfying thunk that made several visitors turn around. This was, I told myself, the most engagement I’d provoked in a gallery since I’d accidentally knocked over a plinth at the Whitechapel in 2019.
The title of the exhibition comes from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a literary reference that is, we are assured, far from accidental. Grosse is interested in urgency, in motion, in the rejection of established structures. I understood this completely while simultaneously failing to advance the film correctly, which meant that approximately fourteen of my thirty-six exposures were double-exposed onto the same frame. In retrospect this feels thematically appropriate. The works exist in “constant negotiation with one another, creating an interference within the work itself.” I had simply extended that interference into the medium of Kodak Portra 400.
The site-specific installation completely transforms the gallery’s architecture in a way that makes the White Cube’s famous neutrality feel almost bashful by comparison. The walls don’t so much display the work as submit to it. I found myself standing in a corner for quite some time, not because I was having a transcendent experience but because I was trying to work out the correct exposure compensation for a room that was simultaneously mauve, yellow-green, and aggressively orange. The Canon’s meter suggested 1/60th at f/5.6. I used 1/30th at f/4 because that is the kind of decision that separates the committed amateur from someone who simply reads the manual.
White Cube’s Jay Jopling has praised Grosse’s “absolute sense of freedom” and her “fearless determination to explore and expand” painting’s potential. Jopling has never, to my knowledge, tried to load a film canister into an EOS-1N RS while wearing a coat that has too many zips, but the sentiment stands. Grosse’s freedom is total, unembarrassed, almost confrontational in its generosity. Standing inside it, you feel simultaneously very small and oddly included, like being welcomed into a party where everyone is having a better time than you but no one seems to mind.
I left having used approximately twenty-two frames of film, none of them, in all likelihood, any good. The show runs until 31 May. It is not simply viewed, but lived. Bring your own camera. Check the film is in it first.
Katharina Grosse: I Set Out, I Walked Fast, White Cube Bermondsey, until 3 June.
