Katharina Grosse On Transforming Art Basel’s Messeplatz With Color

While the German artist is no stranger to pushing painting beyond the flat surface, working as she often does at architectural and monumental scales, CHOIR is her largest project to date. It was a formidable challenge, she admits, but one that offered unprecedented opportunities to explore color, the body and perception in space. “I found it interesting because here, painting can take so many other elements in it, including many other storylines. Like interacting with a clock, or with the water in the fountain, which is fluid, the indoor and outdoor roof blends into what feels almost like a large canvas.” Notably, Grosse painted everything in sight, including the fountain and the iconic Art Basel logo.

“I have a tool that allows me to go really fast, to speed up and have a very wide reach,” Grosse says. “Then I go and walk and find out how it works, and I look at it, and I make the next decision.” Focusing on energy becomes, for the artist, a way to embrace entropy and the creatively fertile dimension of disorder—matter in motion and constant flux. Through painting, she creates an unscripted, intangible moment, leaving behind marks, glitches, residue and traces that appear in an ever-evolving possibility of becoming and further growth.

While her practice relies on this intuitive, gestural mark-making that is essential to the spontaneity that defines her approach, the scale of the Messeplatz project demanded a preparatory model to map how the composition would unfold.

What felt different for Grosse this time was the opportunity to engage directly with other visual and spatial elements in the environment. “Whether it is the architecture, the clock or even the sunshine, it continuously, potentially changes everything—from here to here—and the people on it,” she reflects. Yet the intervention remains rooted in her fundamental understanding of painting. “It enters into dialogue with tradition, and with other people’s works. It comes from fresco painting, you know—painting in public space. I have to ask myself, how could a painting be part of our life?”

When asked how she would describe her approach to painting and its function, Grosse expresses a deep conviction in the medium’s performative power and its ability to activate a simultaneous connection between body and mind. “I think painting nowadays is an image that has such a strong relationship to everything in our body,” she concludes. “Here in Basel, you’re literally taken into the painting. You enter the image with your whole body, as it navigates and resonates with it. And that’s what I want to do. I want to engage you and involve you, with all your thinking and your experiences, in your life.”