Capacity for Darkness

Editor for the publication: Line Ulekleiv
English translation: Alison McCullough
Proofreading: Karen Elizabeth Lerheim
© BONO, Oslo 2026 for the reproduced works by Katharina Grosse. 

The Light of Blackness

Learning that colour is a fiction of light is one of the primary shocks of growing up: that this hitherto deeply physical thing is just a reflection, and nothing can keep its colours under the cover of darkness, are monstrous things to understand, even for my adult mind.
–Tacita Dean[1]

Katharina Grosse’s exhibition Black Bed takes its title from a new installation that builds upon one of her most central works, Das Bett, from 2004 (figs. 1–2). The German artist, who is considered one of the most important contemporary artists of our time, is known in particular for her expansive paintings. One of the most prominent characteristics of Grosse’s style is her radical, transformative use of colour. She regards colour as something intimate and deeply corporeal – a form of energy transformation.[2]

It may therefore seem paradoxical that the exhibition’s title, Black Bed, rather than connoting vibrant colours, evokes a darkness where no colours are visible.[3] As the quotation from British artist Tacita Dean suggests, colour exists in an almost existential relationship to light and darkness. In the exhibition, the relationship between light and darkness has several layers. A continual and active challenging of dividing lines and ‘either or’ reasoning permeates Grosse’s entire artistic practice, along with her thinking around both life and art. That the exhibition’s title emphasises ‘black’, in addition to the word’s etymology in a Norwegian and an English context, may also be seen in the light of her resistance to unambiguous contrasts.

The etymology of the word ‘black’ is tied to the Norse word svartr, and is historically linked to cultural and social notions of colour and purity. [4] Svartr stems from the Proto-Indo-European root swordo-, which means ‘black’, ‘dirty’ and ‘dark’. The colour was thereby originally associated with more than just its visual appearance; it became a carrier of negative social associations. In Norse literature, svartr is used in comparisons such as ‘black as pitch’ or ‘black as a raven’ – and the colour often symbolises the unknown, the threatening or the impure. In contrast to this Norwegian development, in English the word has an etymological history centred around fire; ‘black’ comes from the Proto-Germanic blakaz, which means ‘burnt’ or ‘charred’. [5] The word is probably also related to the Proto-Indo-European root bhleg-, which originally meant ‘burn’ or ‘singe’, but which in some Germanic languages came to describe the result of burning – that is, the dark, charred colour. The root bhleg- encompasses all aspects of fire, including its bright light, and is linked to the English words ‘bleach’ and ‘blaze’, and to the French word for white, ‘blanc’.[6] In this way, the English etymology of the word ‘black’ goes beyond fixed dividing lines and carries within it both light and darkness, from the blackest coal to a flame’s most dazzling brightness.

While the Norwegian word ‘svart’ is mainly linked to cultural and social notions of colour and purity, the English word ‘black’ is associated with burning and luminous flames. The word therefore encompasses a dynamic and powerful process that has its origins in transformation, rather than in static, moral categories such as black/white, good/evil, pure/impure – something that also resonates with Grosse’s artistic practice. Even though she always operates within a domain that features painting as its starting point, her works can simultaneously be described as installations and sculptures, often with performative aspects. Such a challenging of established media and categorical dividing lines is reflected not only in her thinking around how a painting may appear anywhere, but also in her belief in the inherent potential at the intersection of art, space and audience. Grosse herself has stated: ‘Boundaries deny what is possible; they generate fear, and they sever the entanglements which we live.’[7]

Dean’s assertion in the introductory quotation regarding colour’s fictitious status can be linked to a moment in Grosse’s childhood and her subjective relationship to colour, light and darkness. As a child, she would play a game where, before she could get up in the morning, she had to erase all the shadows in the room – those on the window sill or the bedside lamp – using an imaginary brush.[8] The game almost became a kind of obsession for Grosse.[9] This early interest in the dissolution of borders between objects, surroundings and architecture has developed into a lifelong artistic exploration of what painting can be, and its relationship to three-dimensional space in particular.

Grosse’s artistic practice, which centres around painting as a medium, is often described as transboundary. Such a description takes as its starting point the traditions of modernist painting, in which the work plays out on a canvas’s two-dimensional surface, is hung vertically on a wall, and addresses the viewer’s upright body. The American art historian Rosalind Krauss links such verticality to the intellect and the purely visual, rather than the corporeal. In what she calls modernistic visuality, Krauss views verticality in connection with how the human body is biologically raised from the ground, towards the transcendent – the rational and the ideal.[10] Here, verticality is in opposition to the earth’s horizontality, and to the sensual and the erotic.[11] By comparison, Grosse’s magnificent site-responsive paintings act as hybrids, expanding, often horizontally, beside a railway line, in a bedroom, on sandy beaches or across abandoned buildings – as present as a house, as versatile as a spirit.[12] Nature, architecture and the viewer’s body are united within the work’s sphere. Through their relation to the viewer and the very process of their creation, in which Grosse often uses a spray gun instead of a paintbrush, the works also contain a performative dimension.

The Exhibition as Landscape

With the new work Black Bed as its fulcrum, MUNCH’s exhibition Black Bed wishes to give the public insight into the span of Katharina Grosse’s approach to painting over several decades. The exhibition also gives the artist space to explore her long-held fascination with the works of Edvard Munch, which has been with her since she was an art student.

Both Edvard Munch and Grosse are artists whose practice is defined by a radical approach to painting.[13] Rather than painting realistic motifs, Munch drew upon his own life experience and developed an expressive style of painting that no one had ever seen before. When he exhibited The Sick Child (1885–86) (fig. 3) at the Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania (today Oslo) in 1886,[14] the work’s many layers of paint, marked brushstrokes and scratches in the canvas surface were criticised and mocked as unfinished and unsuccessful.[15] The Sick Child became a starting point for Munch, who wanted to paint ‘living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love’,[16] and who throughout his entire career mixed figuration and abstraction in innovative ways.

In the exhibition, the work Black Bed features as an homage to, but also a dark counterpart to, Munch’s The Sun (1912–13).[17] In the period 1910–1913, he painted more than ten versions of this motif. As well as being regarded as one of his most abstract works, the American art historian Patricia G. Berman also views the motif series as being marked by an exploration of a spontaneous way of working with the canvas.[18] Berman sees traces of Munch’s swift working method in the canvas surface, which features visible traces of quick decisions and gestures.[19] A similar physical approach is also found in Grosse’s works: the use of the spray gun allows for greater speed than a paintbrush, for example. This gives her painting a fluid, almost flowing materiality, where each colour is intuitively spray-painted layer by layer onto the canvas, floor or bed.

After completing his monumental decoration of the University Aula in Oslo – of which The Sun (1911) (fig. 4) is a central part – Munch purchased the Ekely property on the outskirts of Oslo in 1916,[20] where he lived and worked until his death in 1944. In addition to what Munch referred to as his large ‘winter studio’ (fig. 5), he also had several outdoor studios. Today the property is still surrounded by lush green spaces.

Ahead of the exhibition at MUNCH, Grosse has worked in Edvard Munch’s Studio at Ekely, where she has produced the twenty works on paper that are shown in the exhibition. Grosse has used both a spray gun and a paintbrush, and a dynamic is created between the different techniques. Sometimes the sequences of colours accentuate each other, while at other times they are erased and camouflaged.

During this year’s stay in Norway, Grosse has also visited other places where Munch lived and worked, such as Kragerø, Hvitsten and Åsgårdstrand, thereby continuing to explore a subject she first began to investigate in 1988. At that time, she travelled to Oslo to experience the Munch Museum at Tøyen and the University Aula’s large-scale decorations, before her trip continued over the Hardanger Plateau to Bergen and culminated in Bodø and Lofoten, where Grosse slept under the open sky and painted watercolours. The entire trip was motivated by a wish to see the colourful darkness in Munch’s shadows and the light in The Sun with her own eyes.

Almost four decades later, Grosse describes the stay at Ekely as an explorative experience. She could imagine how Munch worked, and experience the rooms and landscape he saw – from the intense light that shines through the studio’s skylight or the leaves on the old apple trees in the garden, to the cold morning sun above Kragerø’s coastal landscape, which inspired Munch to paint The Sun (fig. 6) in his outdoor studio at Skrubben (fig. 7). Grosse has documented her stay at the studio through a video diary, which among other elements features her own work at Ekely in various phases, the shoreline in Kragerø early in the morning, Munch’s house in Hvitsten, and a spatial analysis of the Ekely studio, both indoors and outdoors. In one of the film recordings, Grosse says that the studio is not a place for debate, but a place where ‘you live in the process’,[21] and the energy and vitality of the process are utterly central to the works she has created at Ekely.

The exhibition Black Bed contains a selection of paintings on canvas, which span the period 2004 to 2023, and a group from this selection opens the exhibition. The paintings, and their original exhibition contexts, provide insight into how Grosse has worked scenographically with her art in various ways,[22] and how she has integrated everyday objects such as clothes, books and furniture and used natural elements like soil into her in-situ works.[23] The large-scale painting Untitled (2004) was one of the works in The Poise of the Head und die anderen folgen at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 2004 – integrated as a part of an installation where Grosse first used soil as an artistic material (fig. 8).[24] In Untitled (2009), which is also shown in the exhibition at MUNCH, one finds traces of soil on areas of the canvas. These traces are left-overs from mounds of earth, which served as stencils during the painting process and were subsequently removed.

The work Black Bed consists of a selection of elements taken from Das Bett, which used the artist’s own bedroom in Düsseldorf as raw material: Grosse’s unmade bed and crumpled sheets, books, cardboard boxes and clothes on the floor appear to have been placed randomly and spontaneously. A dark, almost black area of painterly density unfolds across the floor and embraces all the elements. The shape spreads up the wall behind the bed, with intense accents of colour in blue, red and pink. A yellow, circular stroke on the wall appears as an abstracted sun shining out across the exhibition space from its dark origins. Black Bed stretches all the way across to the monumental work Locke (2025–26) on the opposite side of the room. The sensory encounter between these two works links them together, and this is the first time Grosse is showing two in-situ paintings together in a single exhibition. Locke is a good example of the ambitious, large-scale installations Grosse has produced in recent years: a three-metre-high painting installation with an organic and undulating form, reminiscent of a lock of hair. The painting spans two undulating aluminium panels and flows onto the floor around them, and is located close to the work she created at Ekely. The open space appears as a landscape, with Black Bed on the horizon like a dark sun.

A consistent feature of Grosse’s artistic practice is that she brings older works into new contexts – something which is apparent in the dialogue between Das Bett and Locke through Black Bed. Chronology is of subordinate significance for Grosse, who views all her works as being in a state of constant interaction, with no beginning or end. This way of working with artworks over time is also evident in another work in the exhibition, Untitled (2016). Using stencils on the canvas’s surface creates a visual impression of negative and positive spaces, which oppose one another within the image. Ten years later, Grosse returns to this painting in connection with the new works Black Bed and Locke, which in retrospect she sees in the painting’s two-dimensional surface: Black Bed as the dark green, shadowy landscape that pushes against the intensely vivid energy of the warm, undulating orange of Locke. Untitled becomes for the artist a revitalised arena for the tension that is created between the two works and their respective energies, an expression of a unifying mode of thought that marks the entire exhibition space.

Spray Gun at the Bedside

In the installation Black Bed, Grosse reimagines Das Bett – a work that arose when she destroyed her most intimate and private room. Furniture such as the bed and chest of drawers, and all the objects that lay randomly strewn around, like clothes and other items such as books and magazines, were covered by the spray gun’s layers of colour. She thereby destroyed the space in which she could be most vulnerable.[25] Like several of the artist’s works, Das Bett can in retrospect only be experienced through documenting photographs. These images show a brightly lit, sparsely furnished room with white walls. The painting’s dynamic colours – deep purples, shifting shades of green, bright yellow, orange-red, and a dark area in which blue, purple, orange and dark red tones gather into a deep, radiating field – give the impression of having expressively landed in the room.

Das Bett marked a turning point in Grosse’s artistic practice, and also in her personal life. The work points to a moment when her understanding of the possibilities of painting was expanded: it was the first time she included symbolic and narrative objects from her own life in her painting practice, and the first time she made use of the spray gun technique in a way that merged the painting’s image space with reality’s three-dimensional and everyday spaces.

A significant work that illustrates Grosse’s journey towards Das Bett is Untitled (1998), on display in Kunsthalle Bern (fig. 9), and often referred to as ‘the green corner’.[26] Here she used a spray gun to create a painting directly on a wall for the first time. The painting appears to leap from the corner of the room, and unites the architectural and the pictorial space in a dark, deep green shadow. It is important to Grosse that the painting and the space can exist simultaneously without cancelling each other out; the encounter between them is temporary, as if the painting is actually in motion and on its way elsewhere, perhaps towards the artist’s bedroom.

In the period surrounding Das Bett, Grosse integrated objects such as bookcases, beds and clothing into various exhibition contexts. As early as in ohne sattel reiten II at Galerie Conrads in Düsseldorf in 2003, the work consisted of a bookcase close to a window, through which daylight entered. A painting in dark purple and almost acidic green, with elements of dazzling white, extended from the window to the bookcase (fig. 10).[27] In Double Floor Painting at Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik in Odense in 2004 (fig. 11), the bookcase’s form – full of books – was repeated in a work that incorporated the entire room, the floor and parts of the walls, along with two canvases. In Perspectives 143: Katharina Grosse at CAMH Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (fig. 12), piles of clothing and stacks of books were strewn about the exhibition space, supplying varying scales and textures. Das Bett stands out because it took over the artist’s private space, and these exhibitions show how the use of a space and its accoutrements preoccupied Grosse at this time.[28] In Two Younger Women Come In and Pull Out a Table at De Pont Museum in Tilburg in 2013 (figs. 13 –14), where the painting Untitled with traces of soil was also included, Grosse presented a bundle of clothes mounted on a rod hanging from the ceiling.

This exploration of the artistic impact of incorporating objects charged with personal and cultural connotations into paintings, such as bookcases, clothing and furniture, originated in Das Bett, which marks a shift in Grosse’s artistic practice:

I changed my relationship to storytelling and to narration, which was something that I  had wanted to exclude until then. Back then, until 2004, I thought of painting as an isolated field. I had a vision of what painting could be that was very restricted by my culture, by my perspective. When I made the bedroom it was the first time that I multiplied the perspectives.[29]

Das Bett also represented a moment at which she first let go of the rules she had set for herself.[30] The inclusion of elements from external reality represented a break from these rules, as did the new way in which she now related to institutional considerations and architectural structures.[31] The American curator Dan Cameron points out that the work introduced a new dimension to Grosse’s art, which would lead to her ambitious, large-scale paintings of more recent years.[32] Locke is a good example of such a work.

In Das Bett, it is not just about how painting coincides with objects from a lived life, but also about how the very spatiality of the bedroom itself is changed when the painting incorporates that space into the pictorial. Cameron points out that by taking possession of the space, Grosse visually changes its architectural and sculptural formulation. It becomes an element within the painting[33] – something Grosse had already explored with her green corner in 1998. The bed also conjures a horizontal, bodily experience, in contrast to the vertical or frontal position from which one usually experiences the world or a painting.[34] According to the artist, the work led her to relating to her practice as something staged, characterised by theatricality, to a greater extent – something that would influence her continued work with painting’s possibilities.[35]

Uncontrollable Generosity

Even as an art student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the late 1980s, Grosse was looking for ways to ‘come into the space’.[36] Her student days coincided with a period in which postmodernism began to challenge modernist painting traditions, with connections to various modes of thought such as post-structuralism, deconstruction and postcolonial theory. According to the Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, these currents influenced Grosse’s practice[37] – in particular the post-structuralist Jean-François Lyotard’s appeal to recognise minor narratives (‘petits récits’) rather than grand narratives (‘grands récit’).[38]

In this context, it is natural to highlight the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg’s formalistic approach to the American abstract painting of the post-war period. For Greenberg, a painting should embrace the canvas’s two-dimensionality and flatness, and not refer to anything beyond itself, such as other artistic media.[39] While Greenberg insisted on flatness and self-referentiality, Grosse seeks to discover how a painting can arise within three-dimensional space and activate our bodily experience. She has stated that modernism’s desire for universality does not resonate with her, and that she seeks out moments in which the painting and the world coincide.[40] To deny and to exclude are prevailing techniques in modernist, abstract painting,[41] but for Grosse there is greater value in tension and imbalance – something she describes through the German word ‘Sprung’:

On the one hand, it means opening, crack, and on the other hand, it means movement and can be associated with abstract thinking. Descriptively I find the term abstract for work an unfavourable one, because of its strong ties to modernism. In the generations of development that have consciously distanced themselves from the abstract, I see my work providing a possibility to make leaps that are not determined by the “one thing after the other” structure.[42]

For both Enwezor and the German curator Angela Stief, Grosse’s form of abstraction is about a non-conformist and liberating stance,[43] visible in the porous boundaries between painting, sculpture, landscape and installation in her practice.[44] A performative element to Grosse’s practice also often comes into play, in that the public must often move around her larger works in order to experience them in their entirety, as is the case with Locke.[45] The artist’s corporeality can be read through the spray gun’s layers of paint. For Grosse, the body is a central part of the work – both the viewer’s body in its encounter with the work, and her own, implicated through the creation process.

Grosse’s use of the spray gun as a tool has been a way of finding a connection between artistic practice and lived life.[46] Painting with a spray gun requires her to wear industrial protective equipment: a full bodysuit and breathing mask. The spray gun itself impacts on the process in several ways: it allows her to paint larger surfaces than would be possible with a paintbrush and places no limitations on her choice of surface. The spray gun expels the paint, layer upon layer, with nearly the same speed as her gaze sweeps the surface. The surface may be paper, grass, sand, or a building – with the help of assistants, the spray gun also makes it possible for Grosse to work over time without running out of paint. This gives her works a specific, fluid and corporeal materiality. For Grosse, the spray gun is also connected to the origins of painting, which she describes as follows:

The spray is very important, and it harks back to the earliest forms of painting that we know – prehistoric tracings of hands that are believed to have been made by blowing through hollow animal bones onto cave walls.[47]

In the fluid character of the works, Grosse sees a form of positive aggression in the way the paintings run outwards and seep beyond institutional contexts, which she refers to as a form of ‘uncontrollable generosity’.[48] In MUNCH’s exhibition, this characteristic comes to the fore in the way the paintings appear to flow outwards from the edge of the bed, or from large aluminium shapes onto the floor. Several of the works bear traces of a painterly motion that stretches from the canvas to the wall, as in Untitled (2023) (fig. 15). The motifs are also taken up again and reworked several times in new contexts, such as in Black Bed and Untitled (2004). While Greenberg sought what he regarded as painting’s purity and autonomy, Grosse offers us the opposite: a painting that reaches towards the world, assimilates it, and refuses to be delimited.

A Poetics of Painting

In contrast to her other works, Grosse did not have the viewer in mind when she created Das Bett.[49] This was a work she created for herself, and which she showed to very few people. However, the bed motif has been a recurring element in Grosse’s artistic practice for more than 20 years up until Black Bed, which is the seventh work to take the bed as its point of departure. According to Cameron, the motif brought the domestic, private sphere into the exhibition space, and created friction between this and the ‘neutral’, public space.[50] Here, Cameron is thinking specifically of a number of exhibitions from the same year as or the year after Das Bett, such as Infinite Logic Conference at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall (2004) (figs. 16–17),[51] where the shimmering, rectangular painting Untitled (2004) was shown, which may also be experienced in the exhibition at MUNCH.

It would be several years before the motif of the bed appeared again – not until 2023, with The Bedroom at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris (fig. 18).[52] Here the work’s purpose seems to be a reiteration of and homage to the work from the bedroom in Düsseldorf. Grosse has said that it has not been possible to recreate Das Bett in an exhibition context, since it was originally created under such specific conditions.[53] The earlier works with bed motifs from 2004 and 2005 instead seem to represent an ongoing exploration of the relationship between painting, space and architecture.

Black Bed is in dialogue with the later work shown at Galerie Max Hetzler in that it also pays homage to Das Bett, but at MUNCH what is new is that the work embraces darkness. Here Grosse allows Black Bed’s darkness to be in dialogue with Edvard Munch’s light in The Sun, where the sun’s dazzling rays are fragmented within the picturesque, abstract landscape. In addition, Black Bed can be viewed in relation to one of Munch’s last self-portraits, namely the painting Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–43) (fig. 19), which is exhibited in MUNCH’s collection exhibition Infinite. In a strikingly bright image – which is surprising given the symbolism often read into the painting – we see the aging Munch standing with his arms hanging loose at his sides in a home interior that features a grandfather clock, paintings on the walls and a bed. Nuances of light and darkness divide the picture plane in two. In the painting’s brightest area, we see the bed and deeper into the room where paintings hang on the walls, while Munch and the clock are situated in the painting’s darkest area. In her interpretation of the painting, the Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal focuses on Munch’s formal strategies, and how one can read the bed as the painting’s most important element through the fact that it is more abstractly painted than the rest of the subject – something she describes as ‘a poetics of painting’.[54] Bal also points out the word ‘between’ in the work’s title, and how this refers to a threshold, something that ‘divides and connects, time and timelessness, life and death’.[55] Such a focus on what lies beyond clear dividing lines and the light that surrounds a darker symbolism resonates with Grosse’s ambiguous practice in several ways.

For Grosse, Black Bed also relates to works by other contemporary artists, such as the installation My Bed (1998) by the British artist Tracey Emin (fig. 20).[56] Emin’s work consists of an unmade bed, where an imprint of a head can still be seen on the pillow, as if someone has just got up after spending too long in bed. On the floor, gathered on a blue rug, is a chaotic jumble of various objects – everything from used tissues, condoms and cigarette butts to slippers, newspapers and empty alcohol bottles. Like Emin’s work, Das Bett arises from a moment in life marked by rupture.

Black Bed’s capacity for darkness can be viewed in several ways. In addition to the work’s dark visual tones, one can envisage a movement from the floor and up the wall – like a black sunrise. Grosse often uses words like aggression, liberation[57] and purification when she describes Das Bett, and the work is often linked to the artist’s personal biography – a time marked by agitation and crisis. In a conversation, the American artist and writer Jarrett Earnest asks Grosse whether it makes sense for her to view Das Bett in relation to queerness. Grosse agrees that the work has a sexual dimension, and that it was created during a period in which her life felt chaotic.[58] She elaborates on this in a conversation with the Indonesian-Brazilian artist Dan Lie:

The bedroom piece was very much for myself. I felt a different urgency in it, I felt there was something deeply unresolved in my life back then. And I did not know what kind of crisis it was. I could not name it or speak about it. My urge to paint took over and guided me towards my most private space, my bedroom. The painting possessed me, it became inevitable. I’m always looking for potential friction or conflicting elements in a situation. This is where my gesture is rooted, where its potential for transformation is energized.[59]

Grosse kept Das Bett for a year, and purchased an extra bed in order to be able to sleep in the apartment,[60] which indicates a strong desire to live with the work. Harry Weller, creative director at Tracey Emin Studio, describes Emin’s My Bed as both a time capsule and a form of self-portrait.[61] Grosse’s Das Bett is linked to this work by Emin: both works arose from a moment in the artists’ lives that has in retrospect been described as a form of crisis. Das Bett can also be connected with Munch’s work through its existential aspects, as well as a painterly directness. The sketch Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–43) (fig. 21) shows a different composition than that of the final painting. Here the male figure stands in front of the clock. For the American art historian John Ravenal, this indicates that the clock and the bed were actual pieces of furniture in Munch’s life.[62] The characteristic bedspread is part of the museum’s collection (fig. 22).

As Krauss’s notions of verticality and horizontality indicate, the bed’s horizontal position invites a bodily experience that is not centred around the intellect and the purely visual, but rather the more fundamental states associated with the bed’s domain: pleasure, dreams, rest, loneliness and illness. Prior to modern times, the bed in the home connected us more fundamentally to life’s beginning and end. In line with developments in Western medicine, these fundamental aspects of life have to a greater extent played out in sterile hospital surroundings, far removed from everyday life.[63] For Grosse, the bed became a place of transgression and purification; for Emin it became a place of decay, breakdown and healing;[64] and for Munch the bed became an image of aging, time and death.

The Sun’s Dark Centre

The aggression, but also the liberation that Grosse sees in Das Bett, the crises that led to the work’s creation, and how Grosse positions Black Bed in relation to Munch’s life-affirming work The Sun, provide the background for the etymological origins of the English word ‘black’ being able to be read in her new works in several ways – as an ability to hold both light and darkness. In the darkness, Grosse allows the bed to preserve the brilliance of colour, while in The Sun, Munch allows us to stare directly at the sun’s impossible centre, without after-images being burned onto our retinas.[65] In connection with Grosse’s exhibition Black Bed, an early version of The Sun (1910–12) is being shown in the collection exhibition Monumental at MUNCH. What sets this early version apart from Munch’s other versions of The Sun is that a clear black dot can be seen in the sun’s centre – like the dark after-image that remains on our retinas after we have looked directly at the source of all life.

In a conversation with the Austrian author Klaus Dermutz, Grosse explains that she does not need black pigment to create darkness: ‘The darkened comes about on its own, even the dirty, I don’t need a black tone to achieve that.’[66] This links to Grosse’s fascination with, and observation of, the fact that Munch’s shadows are often purple, rather than black.[67]

As in Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed, where Munch uses bright colours to depict something thematically dark, several of his other paintings also show that darkness and shadows are not communicated through black, but through the palette’s full range of colours. In Death Struggle (1915) (fig. 23),[68]  the wallpaper’s circular pattern appears to clump together into shadows in gradations of purple, brownish green and various shades of blue, behind five people who stand at a dying person’s bedside. In Vampire (1916–18) (fig. 24), Munch uses dark shades of blue and green with hints of red in shadows that merge with the woman’s fiery hair and the man’s undefined body. In Red House and Spruces (1942–43) and Self-Portrait (1940–43) (figs. 25–26), Munch builds up the shadows from lighter, clearer shades in the form of various nuances of blue, purple and green.

When Grosse visited Norway in 1988, she wanted to understand the impact of the northern light on Munch’s artistic practice and how he saw the world – an area of exploration that remains just as relevant to her today as it was back then.[69] Light and darkness comprise the core of a lifelong investigation.

The light she experienced again during her stay in 2026 she describes as a ‘radiant spectacle’ – the morning sun transforms everything it touches and becomes a reminder of everything that is alive. [70] For Grosse, the light creates a parallel to the impact of the painting in Das Bett: when she allowed the painting to take over her bedroom, the room lost its original function, and its objects were deprived of their everyday status. In the same way, the light attains a power that burns away the recognisability of the surroundings. The world appears in a different and activated way. While in her childhood Grosse wanted to erase the shadows, over time she has discovered their inherent potential. In the light and darkness of colour, Grosse finds an immediacy analogous to the sound of a voice:[71]

I need the brilliance of colour to get close to people, to stir up a sense of life experience and heighten their sense of presence.[72]

End notes

[1] Tacita Dean, ‘Magic Hour’, in Colour, Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Batchelor (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 235.

[2] Isabelle Graw, ‘On Painting: Katharina Grosse in Conversation with Isabelle Graw’, in Katharina Grosse (New York: Gagosian; Rizzoli International Publications, 2018), 271.

[3] Dean, ‘Magic Hour’, 235.

[4] Vladimir E. Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 392.

[5] ‘black, adj. and n.’ Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024) https://www.oed.com/dictionary/black_adj (visited 12 January 2026).

[6] Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, third ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), sub verbis ‘bhleg-’, ‘bhel-’.

[7] Sabine Eckmann, ‘All I Wanted to Do Was Paint: A Conversation Between Katharina Grosse and Sabine Eckmann’, Gagosian Quarterly, 11 May 2023, https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2023/05/11/interview-all-i-wanted-to-do-was-paint-a-conversation-between-katharina-grosse-and-sabine-eckmann/ (visited 12 January 2026).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Emily Wasik, ‘Katharina Grosse Sticks to Her Guns’, Interview Magazine, 2014, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/katharina-grosse (visited 12 January 2026).

[10] Rosalind Krauss, ‘No More Play’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1986), 69.

[11] Ibid, 73.

[12] ‘Katharina Grosse: The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped’, e-flux announcement, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/169017/katharina-grossethe-horse-trotted-another-couple-of-metres-then-it-stopped/ (visited 12 January 2026).

[13] I would like to thank my co-curator and colleague Trine Otte Bak Nielsen for having been an invaluable sparring partner in the work on this text.

[14] The Autumn Exhibition (est. 1882) is Norway’s annual national art exhibition, open to all artists through free submissions and judged by the artists themselves – a model which is regarded as unique in a European context.

[15] Petra Pettersen, ‘The Sick Child’, in Edvard Munch. Infinite, ed. Tor Eystein Øverås (Oslo: MUNCH, 2022), 98.

[16] Edvard Munch, MM N 63. Note, (1889–) 1929, eMunch.no, Munchmuseet, https://www.emunch.no/HYBRIDNo-MM_N0063.xhtml#ENo-MM_N0063-00-01r (visited 5 May 2026).

[17] For more about Edvard Munch’s painting The Sun, a visit to MUNCH’s collection exhibition Monumental is highly recommended.

[18] Patricia G. Berman, ‘The Sun’, In Edvard Munch. Infinite, ed. Tor Eystein Øverås (Oslo: MUNCH, 2022), 408.

[19] Ibid.

[20] The Sun works were painted in the years 1910–1913, mainly outdoors in Hvitsten and Kragerø.

[21] Katharina Grosse’s video diary, recorded at Ekely in June 2026. Private documentation. Some of the footage is included in the forthcoming MUNCH video portrait of Grosse, which is available digitally: YouTube link.

[22] Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, “In Conversation: Katharina Grosse in Conversation with Mathilda Legemah,” YouTube video, published 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZS5uF-m2LU (visited 10 January 2026).

[23] In-situ here refers to works where the artist has spray-painted colour directly onto architecture, interiors and landscapes.

[24] Grosse has discussed her use of soil as a reference to how colour pigment is the primary ingredient in paint. See Klaus Dermutz, ‘A Tree Could Be a Paintbrush’, Katharina Grosse: In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2025).

[25] Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse, ‘Conversation between Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse', in Katharina Grosse: The Sprayed Dear, ed. Hendrik Bündge (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Dresden: Sandstein Kommunikation, 2025), 330.

[26] Emily LaBarge, ‘Some of These Things Are Not Like the Others’, in Katharina Grosse: The Sprayed Dear, ed. Hendrik Bündge (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Dresden: Sandstein Kommunikation, 2025), 106.

[27] For more examples: see Katharina Grosse’s work in the group exhibition There’s no land but land (2003) at Meyer Riegger Galerie in Karlsruhe.

[28] For more examples: see Taxi und Tour (2006) at Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich, They Had Taken Things Along To Eat Together (2012) at Johann König GmbH, as well as I can’t sleep, I can’t eat (2014), which consists of an exhibition catalogue on a pillow painted in shades of deep green with yellow-orange shimmer, produced for the exhibition Inside the Speaker at Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

[29] Lie and Grosse, “Conversation between Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse,” 329.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Dan Cameron, ‘Cascades of Discontinuity’, in Katharina Grosse (New York: Gagosian; Rizzoli International Publications, 2018), 143.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Hamburger Bahnhof, ‘In Conversations: Katharina Grosse in Conversation with Mathilda Legemah’.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Robin Detje, ‘Into Space – Katharina Grosse’s Early Works and a Rupture’, in Katharina Grosse: The Sprayed Dear, ed. Hendrik Bündge (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Dresden: Sandstein Kommunikation, 2025), 161.

[37] Okwui Enwezor, ‘Katharina Grosse’s Festival of Form’, in Katharina Grosse (New York: Gagosian; Rizzoli International Publications, 2018), 27.

[38] Ibid, 26–27.

[39] Charles Harrison, Modernism (London: Tate Publishing, 1997), 19–20.

[40] Klaus Dermutz, ‘A Tree Could Be a Paintbrush.’ ’Katharina Grosse: In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2025), 172.

[41] Ibid, 158.

[42] Ibid, 97.

[43] Angela Stief, ‘Katharina Grosse Goes Albertina: Painting Against Representation’, in Katharina Grosse: Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle, eds. Angela Stief and Klaus Albrecht Schröder (Vienna: Albertina; Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 144.

[44] Enwezor, ‘Katharina Grosse’s Festival of Form’, 21.

[45] Other key works in this context: see for example psychylustro – The Drama Wall (2014), Untitled Trumpet (2015) and The Horse Trotted Another Couple Of Metres, Then It Stopped (2018).

[46] Dermutz, ‘A Tree Could Be a Paintbrush.’ Katharina Grosse: In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz, 172.

[47] Lie and Grosse, ‘Conversation between Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse’, 332.

[48] Cecilie Bepler, ‘Interview with Katharina Grosse’, in Katharina Grosse: Double Floor Painting, eds. Lene Burkard and Katharina Grosse (Odense: Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, 2004), 66.

[49] Lie and Grosse, ‘Conversation between Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse’, 329.

[50] Dan Cameron, ‘Cascades of Discontinuity’, in Katharina Grosse (New York: Gagosian; Rizzoli International Publications, 2018), 143.

[51] Other exhibitions highlighted by Dan Cameron include If Music No Good I No Dance at VIAFARINI-Associazione per la promozione della ricerca artistica, Milan (2004) and Bee Troot at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Los Angeles (2005).

[52] See also Katharina Grosse’s solo exhibition Shifting the Stars at Centre Pompidou Metz (2024–25).

[53] Lie and Grosse, ‘Conversation between Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse’, 333.

[54] Mieke Bal, “Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed,” in Edvard Munch. Infinite, ed. Tor Eystein Øverås (Oslo: MUNCH, 2022), 58.

[55] Ibid.

[56] MUNCH showed the solo exhibition Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch. The Loneliness of the Soul (2021–22), curated by Kari J. Brandtzæg, which also included the work My Bed.

[57] Jarrett Earnest, ‘Forty Years of Disappearance in Seven Places’, in Katharina Grosse: Shifting the Stars (Metz: Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2024), 111.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Lie and Grosse, ‘Conversation between Dan Lie and Katharina Grosse’, 330.

[60] Earnest, ‘Forty Years of Disappearance in Seven Places’,111.

[61] Tate, ‘Behind the Scenes: Tracey Emin's My Bed’, YouTube video, published 14 February 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV60pRaUHYI (visited 26 February 2026)

[62] John Ravenal, Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation, ed. Rosalie West (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016; Oslo: Munchmuseet, 2016), 58. 

[63] See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); originally published as L'Homme devant la mort (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977).

[64] Tate, ‘Behind the Scenes: Tracey Emin's My Bed’.

[65] Read the conversation between co-curator Trine Otte Bak Nielsen and Katharina Grosse in this catalogue for a deep dive into Grosse’s fascination with Munch.

[66] Klaus Dermutz, ‘A Tree Could Be a Paintbrush.’ Katharina Grosse: In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2025), 98.

[67] Hamburger Bahnhof, “In Conversations: Katharina Grosse in Conversation with Mathilda Legemah.”

[68] To experience Edvard Munch’s painting Death Struggle, a visit to MUNCH’s collection exhibition Infinite is recommended.

[69] MUNCH video portrait in connection with the exhibition Black Bed, 2026. Available digitally: YouTube link.

[70] Katharina Grosse’s video diary, recorded at Ekely in June 2026. Private documentation. Some of the footage is included in the forthcoming MUNCH video portrait of Grosse, which is available digitally: YouTube link.

[71] Dermutz, “A Tree Could Be a Paintbrush.” Katharina Grosse: In Conversation with Klaus Dermutz, 79.

[72] Ati Maier, ‘Katharina Grosse by Ati Maier’, BOMB Magazine, 1 April 2011, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2011/04/01/katharina-grosse/ (visited 15 January 2026).