ABSTRACTION IN ART is not to everyone’s taste, but I enjoy viewing it. Maybe, this is because I was brought up by a parent, my mother, who created abstract sculptures. Until 31 May 2026, the White Cube Gallery in London’s Bermondsey is holding an exhibition of abstract works by Katharina Grosse, who was born in West Germany in 1961.

Grosse was educated at art schools in West Germany including Kunstakademie Münster and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Currently, she divides her time between Berlin and New Zealand. Since the 1990s, soon after qualifying at the art schools, she began making creations using acrylic paint applied with an industrial spray gun. Often, she sprays onto canvases, but also on other things. For example, in 2004, she sprayed the bedroom of her flat in Düsseldorf — everything in it including the bed, floor and the clothes, books and shoes strewn across it — in rainbow-hued acrylics. At the White Cube, one large gallery has been filled with piles of rubble. These piles, the floor, and the walls of the room have all been sprayed with coloured paints, producing an environment that looks psychedelic.

In the other rooms at White Cube, one can view huge canvases on which she has created abstract compositions using her paint sprayer and a variety of different coloured paints. I liked most of these creations. They look good as a whole and, also, when examined in detail. Using her paint application methods, she has produced many visually intriguing effects.

The gallery’s website explained:

“Since the late 1990s, Grosse has primarily worked with acrylic pigments and an industrial spray gun, creating marks that register not only the image, but also the movement of her body as she makes it. The spray gun allows her to extend her body beyond its reach, as far as her eyes can see. In this way she proposes a correlation between the act of looking and the act of painting, an approach informed, in part, by her early exposure to street shows and experimental theatre – productions that dismantled the traditional division between stage and audience.”

I like the idea that what can be seen in the paintings is a record of the movements she made while creating them. Of course, this is the case with every artist’s paintings, but in Grosse’s pictures, the results are not images of objects or ideas but documentation of her movements whilst creating the images.

Apart from being a vibrant and exciting collection of artworks, this show introduces the viewer to an exciting approach to artistic creation.