It Wasn't Us

The paintings of Katharina Grosse can appear anywhere. Her expansive works are multidimensional pictorial worlds in which walls, ceilings, objects, and entire buildings and landscapes are covered with bright colors. For the exhibition IT WASN'T US, the artist has transformed the Historical Hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin as well as the outside area behind the building into an expansive image that radically destabilizes the existing order of the museum space.

The floor of the hall and polystyrene bodies specially designed for the exhibition serve as the pictorial ground, which she has transformed into the final size in several working steps and by means of various scales. In addition, the painting extends beyond the building's boundary into public space, onto the extensive grounds behind the museum and the façade of the Rieckhallen. It Wasn't Us connects neither inside nor outside, nor museum and surroundings, culture and nature, but rather renegotiates our habits of seeing, thinking, and perception. Katharina Grosse, one of the most distinguished painters of international contemporary art, studied at the Kunstakademie Münster and at the Akademie in Düsseldorf, where she held a professorship from 2010 to 2018. Her works have been shown in renowned museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2019), the National Gallery in Prague (2018), the Chi K11 art museum in Shanghai (2018) or as part of the program of the MoMA PS1 in New York (2016), as well as at several biennials, including Aarhus(2017), Venice (2015) and Curitiba (2013).