Conversations | Premiere artist talk: Katharina Grosse and Natalia Grabowska

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Katharina Grosse, Artist, Berlin Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large, Architecture and Site-Specific Projects at Serpentine, London&nbsp;
Katharina Grosse joins curator Natalia Grabowska to discuss her piece for Art Basel’s 2025 Messeplatz project. Together, they’ll explore how co-presence of differences enables us to cooperate and have shaped the project’s development — informing its rhythm, scale, and chromatic intensity.&nbsp;
They’ll delve into foundational themes of love, music, movement, and spatial experience in Grosse’s practice, offering a layered perspective on the specific ways her work responds to both physical context and intangible sensibilities.&nbsp;
Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. &nbsp;Exhibitions and on-site paintings include Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX (1999); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2001); Renaissance Society, Chicago (2007); ‘One Floor Up More Highly’, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2010); ‘Third Man Begins Digging Through Her Pockets’, moCa Cleveland, OH (2012); ‘Wunderblock’ Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2013);&nbsp;psychylustro, Mural Arts Philadelphia (2014);&nbsp;Untitled Trumpet, 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015);&nbsp;Rockaway!, MoMA PS1 at Fort Tilden, New York (2016); ‘The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped’, Carriageworks, Sydney (2018); ‘Mumbling Mud’, chi K art museum, Shanghai, and chi K11 art space, Guangzhou, China (2018–19); ‘Mural: Jackson Pollock/Katharina Grosse’, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019–20); ‘Is it You?’, Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); ‘It Wasn’t Us’, Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2020–21); ‘Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us’, Helsinki Art Museum (2021–22); ‘Chill Seeping, SCAD Museum of Art’, Savannah, Georgia (2022); ‘Apollo, Apollo’, Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice (2022); ‘Splinter’, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); ‘Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions’, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022–23, traveled to Kunstmuseum Bern, 2023; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2024); and ‘Déplacer les étoiles’, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2024–25). Grosse’s permanent installation&nbsp;Canyon&nbsp;was unveiled at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2022. Her upcoming 2025 solo exhibitions include ‘The Sprayed Dear’ at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (April 2025-Jan 2026) and ‘WUNDERBILD’ at Deichtorhallen Hamburg (June-Sept 2025). Collections include the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Nationalgalerie Berlin; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.&nbsp;Katharina Grosse held professorships at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–09) and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18).&nbsp;Since October 2021 she has been the chairwoman of the board of KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V. Among the honors she has received are the Villa Romana Stipend, Florence (1992), the Schmidt-Rottluff Stipend (1993), the Fred Thieler Prize (2003), and the Oskar Schlemmer Prize (2014). She has been selected by The German Federal Government as a jury member for the 2020–23 stipends at Villa Massimo, Rome, Casa Baldi, Olevano Romano, and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
Natalia Grabowska is a curator and researcher based in London. She is Curator at Large of Architecture and Site-Specific Projects at Serpentine, London, and also works with artist Alvaro Barrington on his architectural and artistic projects. She curated solo and group exhibitions, architectural and outdoor projects at Serpentine, including ‘Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt’ (2018), ‘Formafantasma: Cambio’ (2020), ‘Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing’ (2020–2021), Serpentine Pavilion 2022: Black Chapel designed by Theaster Gates and most recently ‘Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You, I Mean Me, I Mean You’ (2024), among others. Previously she worked in international institutions and galleries, including Lisson Gallery, London; Artists Space, New York and Sprüth Magers, London. She was part of curatorial teams for site-specific exhibitions and biennales, including ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ (2017) organized by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory and Krakow PhotoMonth (2011) in Krakow, Poland. Since 2023 she contributed annually to the Prada Frames symposium curated by Formafantasma during Salone del Mobile in Milan. Her curatorial practice and research focus on site-responsive projects and investigate how built environments shape our behaviors and emotional responses.

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