Art Fair
June 16–22, 2025
Messeplatz, Basel
www.artbasel.com
Art Basel has commissioned Katharina Grosse to create a large-scale site-responsive painting for the Messeplatz Project, which this year is curated by Natalia Grabowska, curator at large of architecture and site-specific projects at Serpentine, London. Widely known for her transformative works in which explosive color is sprayed directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes, Grosse embraces the events and incidents that arise as she works, opening up surfaces and spaces to the countless perceptual possibilities of painting. For Art Basel 2025, Grosse transforms the city’s Messeplatz—including the surrounding architecture—into a vivid, chromatic environment. As part of Art Basel’s citywide programming, the public installation highlights the fair’s commitment to presenting art in remarkable and impactful settings.
Katharina Grosse’s CHOIR (2025), a commission by Art Basel Messeplatz Project 2025, installed at Messeplatz, Basel. Artwork © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany 2025. Video: Pushpin Films
Katharina Grosse, CHOIR, 2025, acrylic on asphalt and fabric, 52 feet 6 inches × 298 feet 6 ¾ inches × 180 feet 5 ⅜ inches (16 × 91 × 55 m), commissioned by Art Basel Messeplatz Project, installation views, Messeplatz, Basel © Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany 2025. Photos: Jens Ziehe
For Art Basel 2025, the fair has commissioned Katharina Grosse to create CHOIR, a large-scale, site-responsive painting for the Messeplatz Project. The curator for the project, Natalia Grabowska, met with Grosse in her studio in Berlin ahead of the work’s creation to talk through the process; Grosse’s approach to the specifics of the Messeplatz’s architecture; and the importance of unscripted encounters.
The exhibition Katharina Grosse Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions premiered at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, in September 2022. It continues its tour with presentations at the Kunstmuseum Bern, through June 2023, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn, opening in April 2024. To mark this momentous survey, the show’s curator, Sabine Eckmann, met with Grosse to discuss the evolution of her practice.
The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.
On the occasion of her exhibition Katharina Grosse: Repetitions without Origin at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, the artist spoke with art historian Graham Bader, associate professor of art history at Rice University, about the throughlines in her practice.
From October 21 to 23, 2021, Gagosian Quarterly presented a special English-language online screening of Claudia Müller’s Katharina Grosse: Think Big!
David Reed and Katharina Grosse met at Reed’s New York studio in the fall of 2019 to talk about his newest paintings, the temporal aspects of both artists’ practice, and some of their mutual inspirations.
Katharina Grosse discusses her exhibition Is It You? at the Baltimore Museum of Art with Jona Lueddeckens. They consider what sets the Baltimore installation apart from its predecessors, and how Grosse sees the relationship of the human body to her immersive environments as opposed to her canvases.
On the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Terry R. Myers muses on the manipulations of time in Grosse’s work.
The Summer 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece 1 (1969) on its cover.
The Spring 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #412 (2003) on its cover.
We take a visual tour through Katharina Grosse’s Mumbling Mud and the installation process behind it as the artist discusses the effects of the work’s merging of built and painted space.
Tatiana Trouvé and Katharina Grosse discuss their exhibition Le numerose irregolarità, at the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici, with curator Chiara Parisi.