From June 16th to June 22nd, 2025, Basel Art Week 2025 unfolds as a city-wide constellation of art and culture, bringing together an array of established and emerging fairs, museum exhibitions, outdoor installations, and conferences. Anchored by Art Basel’s flagship fair, with 289 participating galleries and a riotous takeover of Messeplatz by Katharina Grosse, the week extends into alternative spaces, historic buildings, and the urban fabric itself.

From Liste Art Fair’s pulse on emerging talent to the site-specific programming of Basel Social Club, the return of Digital Art Mile, and MAZE’s inaugural design salon, there’s something for all kinds of creative professionals and enthusiasts alike. Meanwhile, new exhibitions and activations are taking place across the Swiss city’s major art institutions, from Fondation Beyeler, to Kunsthalle Basel and the Schaulager. To help you navigate Basel’s busiest week, designboom’s guide charts the layers of exhibitions, interventions, and events, in and out of the fairs – see all the highlights below.

image courtesy of Art Basel

THE FAIRS

art basel 2025

Art Basel unveils its 2025 edition with a program that expands beyond the fair halls. From June 19 to 22, the city of Basel transforms into a vibrant, multilayered exhibition space with 289 leading galleries from 42 countries and territories presenting works across every medium. Renowned German artist Katharina Grosse leads this year’s standout interventions by turning the Messeplatz into a swirling chromatic environment, curated by Natalia Grabowska of Serpentine. Meanwhile, Unlimited returns under the direction of Giovanni Carmine with 67 monumental projects pushing scale, subject, and format, making it the largest edition of the sector to date.

The Premiere sector debuts this year, offering a focused look at recent works that capture urgent themes and fresh artistic voices. The show also marks the return of Kabinett, featuring 24 curated highlights within gallery booths, and introduce the Art Basel Awards Summit, which celebrates 36 visionaries shaping the art world. The Parcours public art sector, curated once again by Stefanie Hessler, animates the city with over 20 site-specific works responding to the theme of Second Nature. Stretching from Clarastrasse to the Rhine, including interventions at the historic Hotel Merian and Münsterplatz, Parcours transforms Basel’s architecture into a narrative of nature, artifice, and hybridity. 

Basel Art Week 2025 unfolds as a city-wide constellation of creativity | image courtesy of Art Basel

messeplatz

Katharina Grosse brings her radical approach to painting into the heart of Basel as she takes over Messeplatz with CHOIR, a monumental site-specific intervention. Armed with her signature spray gun, the artist drenches the urban square and its surrounding structures in layers of vivid pigment, creating an immersive environment that disrupts the routine flow of public space. Curated by Natalia Grabowska, curator at large for architecture and site-specific projects at Serpentine, London, the work stands as one of the fair’s most anticipated highlights.

Katharina Grosse CHOIR, 2025 Messeplatz project, Art Basel Courtesy of the artist (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025 Photography by Jens Ziehe

BMW presents Simply, 2025 by Alvaro Barrington

Alvaro Barrington collaborates with BMW for Art Basel 2025 to present Simply, 2025, a fusion of cutting-edge technology and cultural storytelling. Marking BMW’s 50 years of Art Cars, this latest project reimagines the BMW iX5 Hydrogen through Barrington’s signature colorful lens. Guided by insights from BMW’s hydrogen engineers and inspired by trailblazers like Richard Hamilton, Henri Matisse, David Hockney, and Tina Turner, the artist’s concept bridges past, present, and future, redefining what an Art Car can be in an era of sustainability and cultural reinvention.

image via @bmwgroupculture

liste art fair basel 2025

Liste Art Fair Basel is back for its landmark 30th edition from June 16–22, 2025, a launchpad for fresh voices in contemporary art. Founded in 1996 by a group of young gallerists, Liste has grown into a global hotspot where 99 galleries from 31 countries, with nearly half of them debutants, gather to spotlight emerging talents. Under the leadership of Nikola Dietrich, known for her sharp curatorial eye at Portikus and Kunstmuseum Basel, Liste returns as a platform for critical conversations through its program of performances, talks, workshops, and exhibitions. This year, the fair’s commitment to supporting pioneering practices is amplified by targeted production grants for 11 galleries.

What makes Liste pulse with energy is its embrace of diversity – from galleries presenting playful cultural mashups and political installations to sculptural works that weave sound and history, the fair reads like a global map of artistic exploration. Returning favorites like Cologne’s Drei and Zurich’s Blue Velvet share space with newcomers from Seoul, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and beyond, each offering fresh perspectives on identity, urban life, myth, and ecology.

Innuteq Storch, soon will summer be over, 2023, Wilson Sapplana | image via @liste_art_fair_basel

basel social club

The fourth edition of Basel Social Club, running from June 15th to June 21st, 2025, is moving into the marble-and-vaulted interior of a former private bank in the heart of Grossbasel. More than 100 rooms of the historic Vontobel building will be activated for the first time, opening to the public and marking the launch of FOR ART, Klaus Littmann’s long-term cultural initiative for the site. The 2025 program riffs on the financial legacy of the establishment, reworking its language and architecture to question systems of value, luxury, care, and exchange through a series of site-specific installations, performances, and food encounters.

Inside, expect anything but the typical art fair: a blood bank coexists with wellness suites, jewelry salons, beauty rituals, games, and durational performances. Each room becomes its own world, where spectators turn into participants and conventional hierarchies collapse. 

image via @basel.social.club

the digital art mile

The Digital Art Mile returns to Basel from June 16th to June 22nd, 2025, recharging the city’s art week with digital art as its focal point. Organized by ArtMeta and spread across three distinctive venues, Space25, the 4th Floor, and Kult.Kino Cinema, the fair reclaims Rebgasse as a cultural corridor for digital-native creativity. From generative art and autonomous robots to blockchain-based exhibitions and AI-collaborative works, the week-long programme repositions digital media as an essential thread in contemporary art history. Anchored by the landmark Paintboxed exhibition and a robust two-day conference series, the event bridges past innovation (like the 1980s Quantel Paintbox) with present-day pioneers including Justin Aversano, Ivona Tau, and Simon Denny. Notable sessions include Digital Art in Museums featuring Christiane Paul and Ian Charles Stewart, and Digital Art in Corporations, moderated by designboom, with insights from BMW’s Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst and UBS Digital Art Museum’s Ulrich Schrauth.

image courtesy of ArtMeta

MAZE

MAZE Design Basel, running on June 16th and June 17th, 2025, fills the void left by Design Miami/Basel with an intimate, high-caliber design salon. Set in the neo-Gothic Offene Kirche Elisabethen, the two-day event brings together 11 leading galleries, including Galerie Kreo, Salon 94, and Pierre-Marie Giraud, for a focused showcase of collectible design from the 1950s to today. Historic works by Jacques Adnet and François-Xavier Lalanne appear alongside contemporary pieces by Herzog & de Meuron and the Bouroullec brothers. 

Offene Kirche Elisabethen | image courtesy of MAZE

June Art Fair

Since its launch in 2019, June Art Fair has been carving out a niche as the indie antidote to the usual art fair frenzy. Set inside a raw concrete bunker reimagined by Herzog & de Meuron just a stone’s throw from Messeplatz, June offers a program where community, dialogue, and cross-generational exchange come together.

With a roster including galleries like VI, VII (Oslo), Christian Andersen (Copenhagen), and Galerie Fabian Lang (Zurich), the fair fosters an atmosphere of calm and connection, amplified by its leafy neighbor, the Landhof Community Garden, a green oasis perfectly matching June’s ethos of housing high-caliber art inside a thoughtful space. Special projects like People’s Soup and The Garden Cinema deepen this spirit of collaboration, making June a key chill spot to discover fresh voices during Basel Art Week, running June 16th – 22nd, 2025.

image courtesy of June Art Fair

MUSEUMS, EXHIBITIONS, AND EVENTS

swiss design awards

Running parallel to Art Basel, the Swiss Design Awards take place from June 17th until June 22nd, 2025, spotlighting the most compelling design talent working in and from Switzerland today. Held in Hall 1.1 of Messe Basel, the exhibition showcases 53 finalist projects selected by a jury of the Federal Design Commission and invited experts, culminating in the announcement of 17 prize winners. 

This year’s edition unfolds in a high-stakes, two-round jury process, with a physical exhibition functioning as the final stage of judging. Alongside the finalist presentations, visitors can engage with video portraits and a new publication dedicated to the Swiss Grand Prix Design laureates, offering rare, unpublished insights into their practices. 

chair design by Guy Meldem | image via @swissdesignawards

Schaulager

Twelve years after his landmark exhibition at Schaulager, Steve McQueen returns to the Basel institution with Bass (2024). Known for his powerful films and deeply sensory installations, the Turner Prize–winning artist and Oscar-winning filmmaker now presents his most abstract work to date, a spatial composition of light, color, and sound that stretches perception to its limits. Site-specifically conceived for Schaulager’s unique architecture, Bass invites visitors into an immersive environment where form dissolves and sensation takes over, exploring how immaterial elements can shape our understanding of time and space.

In typical McQueen fashion, the work bypasses narrative in favor of pure atmospheric impact. ‘Light and sound… can sneak into any nook and cranny,’ he reflects, and Bass does exactly that, filling the building like vapor or scent. 

Steve McQueen, Bass, 2024, LED Light and Sound, Courtesy the artist, Co-commissioned work by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and Dia Art Foundation, 15 June – 16 November 2025, Schaulager® Münchenstein/Basel (Installation view), Photo: Pati Grabowicz, © Steve McQueen

Fondation Beyeler

Fondation Beyeler presents a convergence of three distinct artistic visions under one roof. From June 15th to September 21st, 2025, it hosts the most comprehensive European survey in nearly two decades of Vija Celmins, whose meticulous renderings of night skies, spider webs, and ocean surfaces invite a quiet, immersive gaze. Tracing her journey from war-inflected early works to the spatial poetics of her recent pieces, the show reveals how Celmins’ practice bridges the personal and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. Sculptures, which she calls ‘three-dimensional paintings,’ round out a body of work that transforms the act of looking into an act of deep attention.

Running concurrently is ‘There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red’, a rehang of the Beyeler’s painting collection. This bold display draws unexpected parallels between icons like Picasso, Basquiat, Dumas, and Rothko, and introduces the museum debut of Gerhard Richter’s digital projection Moving Picture (946-3), Kyoto Version. Meanwhile, Jordan Wolfson’s Little Room uses VR to dissolve the boundaries between bodies, minds, and identities. In this disorienting, uncanny duet between self and other, Wolfson stretches the emotional and perceptual capacities of virtual space – turning visitors into both subject and mirror in a speculative dance of recognition.

Vija Celmins, Clouds, 1968, Graphite on paper, 34.9 x 47 cm, Collection Ayea + Mikey Sohn, Los Angeles © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery | image by McKee Gallery, New York

Kunstmuseum Basel

Kunstmuseum Basel NEUBAU shines a long-overdue spotlight on one of sculpture’s most radical innovators with Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture. Co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic in collaboration with mumok Vienna, the retrospective brings together around fifty of Rosso’s fragile, light-sensitive sculptures and an expansive archive of 250 photographs and drawings, illuminating his deeply experimental approach to form, media, and artistic identity. Often cast in wax or plaster and shown under shifting light conditions, Rosso’s works resist fixity, hovering between presence and dissolution.

A contemporary of Rodin and a precursor to artists like Brâncuși and Hesse, Rosso challenged the very definition of sculpture. He photographed his own works obsessively, staged them in carefully curated installations, and blurred boundaries between object, image, and illusion. This exhibition not only traces Rosso’s contributions to the avant-garde circles of turn-of-the-century Milan and Paris, but repositions him as a central figure in the story of modern sculpture.

Dialogues with over sixty artists, including Lynda Benglis, Edgar Degas, David Hammons, Meret Oppenheim, and Alina Szapocznikow, underscore the enduring relevance of Rosso’s practice, which continues to echo across conceptual, feminist, and post-minimalist traditions.

Bambino malato, Medardo Rosso, 1895 Plaster, 17.5 × 20 × 19.3 cm Object ID: 86100 Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio Photo: mumok / Markus Wörgötter

Kunsthalle Basel

At Kunsthalle Basel Marie Matusz’s Canons and Continents transforms the back wall of the institution into a field of mirrored vitrines that both obscure and reflect, exploring the porosity of cultural canons and geopolitical borders through sculptural precision and conceptual opacity. Inside the museum, Dala Nasser’s debut exhibition in Switzerland turns to abstraction as a means of resistance and reclamation, using cyanotype-treated fabrics and earth-indexed surfaces to evoke a landscape marked by erasure, infrastructural decay, and histories left unspoken, most poignantly through the imagined reconstruction of a lost Byzantine church in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Ser Serpas stages a raw convergence of performance, painting, and sculpture, deconstructing corporeal forms and temporalities in collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theatre. 

Canons and Continents by Marie Matusz | image courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel

Kunsthaus Baselland

At Kunsthaus Baselland, the group exhibition Whispers from Tides and Forests, on view until August 17th 2025, invites viewers into a space of quiet urgency, where delicate gestures echo loud shifts in global ecologies and social narratives. Featuring works by Caroline Bachmann, Johanna Calle, Lena Laguna Diel, Abi Palmer, Nohemí Pérez, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Belén Rodríguez, Ana Silva, Julia Steiner, Surma, and Liu Yujia, the show foregrounds subtle yet potent responses to planetary crisis, forced migration, and the fragility of shared landscapes.

Moving between continents and media, the exhibition resists grand declarations, instead offering tender, tactile stories that reimagine the human relationship to time, space, and nature. From forest canopies to riverbeds, from whispered grief to acts of resilience, these works resonate with what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls ‘the end of the old stories’, leaving space instead for new, uncertain, and care-driven futures.

Lena Laguna Diel: De quien sembramos las semillas (From whom we sow the seeds), 2025. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view Kunsthaus Baselland 2025 | image by Gina Folly

Museum Tinguely

At Museum Tinguely, three exhibitions explore power, fluidity, and collective memory through radically different lenses. In De tu puño y letra (By Your Own Hand), Suzanne Lacy confronts viewers with a chilling yet crucial spatial encounter: male-presenting participants read letters detailing gender-based violence written by women-identifying survivors. Filmed in a bullfighting arena in Quito, symbolically charged with dominance and violence, the circular projection places visitors at the center of a social reckoning. 

Running concurrently, Midnight Zone dives into the elemental depths with Julian Charrière’s multi-floor solo exhibition. Here, water is not backdrop but protagonist, a living medium of climate, crisis, and collective history. Through film, photography, sculpture, and newly commissioned works, Charrière renders the invisible circulations of the Earth as immersive, affective worlds. Between these two, Scream Machines – Art Ghost Train turns up the surreal with a kinetic homage to Jean Tinguely’s 1977 Crocrodrome. Artists Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez reanimate a vintage ghost train with absurd sculptures, eerie mechanics, and chaotic humor. 

Julian Charrière, The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories III, 2013. Copyright: © 2025 ProLitteris, Zürich; Copyright the Artist

HEK (house of electronic arts)

During Art Basel Week, HEK (House of Electronic Arts) becomes a nucleus of expanded digital vision, presenting a dense program that spans AI, virtual worlds, and pan-Asian perspectives. The current exhibition Other Intelligences investigates how machine learning reshapes concepts of cognition, agency, and empathy, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes intelligence in contemporary culture. 

In parallel, HEK hosts the 6th VH AWARD, a prestigious initiative by Hyundai Motor Group spotlighting emerging digital artists from Asia. From June 16th–22nd, works by finalists Lena Bui, Huda x Mungomery, Tianyi Sun & Fiel Guhit, Wendi Yan, and Inhwa Yeom are shown on a large-scale LED screen on HEK’s outdoor platform, culminating in a panel discussion and award ceremony on June 17th. Expanding beyond the museum walls, the ARTour, curated by HEK director Sabine Himmelsbach—, ctivates public space with augmented reality artworks across Basel, while ArtMeta’s Digital Art Mile along the Kleinbasel Rhine embankment hosts a surge of exhibitions and events that trace the pulse of the global digital art scene.

Jodi | div. [property]

Vitra Design Museum

The Vitra Design Museum dives into the enduring legacy of the shakers with The Shakers: A World in the Making, an exhibition that brings together a collection of finely crafted shaker furniture, architectural fragments, tools, and commercial objects. Curated alongside fresh commissions by contemporary artists and designers, the show unpacks the complex social, spiritual, and material fabric behind the iconic shaker style, an aesthetic rooted in community values and functionality that still resonates today. 

Installation view, The Shakers: A World in the Making, © Vitra Design Museum | image by Bernhard Strauss

Vitra Schaudepot

Vitra Design Museum explores the evolving dialogue between science fiction and design in Science fiction design: from space age to metaverse, on view at Vitra Schaudepot until May 10th, 2026. Featuring over 100 objects from the collection of the museum, the exhibition traces how science fiction has shaped – and been shaped by – design, from early 20th-century visions and space-age aesthetics to digital objects made for the metaverse.

Staged in a futuristic scenography by Argentine artist and designer Andrés Reisinger, the show brings together iconic pieces by Gae Aulenti, Joe Colombo, Verner Panton, and Joris Laarman alongside furniture from classic sci-fi films and Reisinger’s own NFT-born creations. 

Anouk Wipprecht Audi A4 Dress | image courtesy of Vitra Design Museum

maison CLEARING

As Art Basel 2025 unfolds, CLEARING Gallery marks its 15th anniversary with Maison CLEARING, a distinctive off-site exhibition, housed in a historic four-story villa just steps from Messeplatz and the Rhine. Inside the refined rooms of the villa and throughout its lush 1,000-square-meter garden, over 50 international artists, including Violet Dennison, Kayode Ojo, Tomasz Kowalski, Marina Pinsky, and Sara Flores, present works across painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Deliberately slowing the pace of the fair, Maison CLEARING invites visitors to linger, talk, and connect, proposing an alternative to the transactional atmosphere of the main halls. 

image courtesy of CLEARING

project info:

event: Basel Art Week 2025

location: Basel, Switzerland

dates: June 16th – June 22nd, 2025

The post designboom’s guide to basel art week 2025: what to do in and out of the fairs appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

German artist Katharina Grosse wraps Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia with a mesmerizing pearlescent installation. Taking shape as an ethereal prismatic veil, ‘Apollo, Apollo’ dramatically unfolds from the wall to the floor and mantles objects scattered around. Made of metallic mesh fabric, the installation creates a gleaming contrast against the black backdrop, with its body touching the walls gently. 

Known for her prismatic swaths of color usually applied on large-scale artworks, the artist immerses the audience in a vibrant shroud, inviting them into a sensory narrative. ‘Apollo, Apollo’ bears her captivating identity, forming a portal to an imaginary world that encourages visitors to explore what’s reality and illusion.study for Apollo, Apollo,

all photos: Daniela Gorgens, LRRH_©2022, Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

a portal to a dreamlike world

For the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia (see more here), the German artist (here) has printed intricate photography onto a metal mesh fabric that blends the transparent with the opaque, letting outer light filter through. The surface reflects visitors’ movements and celebrates the quintessentially Venetian mirror effect.

‘The image is chosen from a series of photographs showing situations or actions, connected to my painting practice in some way or another. It oscillates between surface, texture, image and object, order and disorder, destruction and creation, tension and release, forced and freeflowing movement.’ Katharina Grosse.

a metallic fluidity takes over ‘Apollo apollo’ installation

The resulting veil resembles knitted sequins and embraces the floor and walls hiding various objects below, such as a pair of boots and a folding chair. Apart from the prismatic paradoxes of its creator, the iridescent installation echoes its Venetian context and aesthetics — Fortuny fabrics, terrazzo mosaics, omnipresent water, and reflections. 

‘Apollo, Apollo’ holds a compositive image of the artist’s hands printed on the mesh fabric. This gesture depicts a moment where the boundaries between painting and photography, image and body, real and illusion are blurred. ‘Painting leaps into an unknown sense of reality, as present, as a house, as versatile, as a spirit,’ mentioned the artist.

project info:

name: Apollo Apollo

artist: Katharina Grosse

dates: from 23 April to 27 November 2022

location: Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia

curator: Claire Staebler

The post katharina grosse’s pearlescent installation unfolds within espace louis vuitton in venice appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

all images: ‘katharina grosse. it wasn’t us’, exhibition view at hamburger bahnhof – museum für gegenwart – berlin, 2020 courtesy könig galerie, berlin, london, tokyo / gagosian / galerie nächst st. stephan rosemarie schwarzwälder, wien
© katharina grosse / VG bild-kunst, bonn 2020 / photo by jens ziehe | video courtesy katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst bonn, 2020

on view at hamburger bahnhof – museum für gegenwart – berlin until january 10, 2021, ‘it wasn’t us’ was realized over several weeks, filling the historic hall as well as the grounds behind the museum and the façade of the so-called ‘rieckhallen’. the painting, which exists only for the duration of the exhibition, intends to seamlessly connect the interior of the institution and the outdoors — transforming the site into a new space of imagination and possibility.

grosse’s kaleidoscopic painting brings together colors and forms, natural and man-made surroundings and its visitors as participants in an all-encompassing amalgamation of hues. the boundaries between objects, and between horizontal and vertical orientations begin to melt away, and the work’s scale continuously shifts depending on the visitor’s position. consequently, as the viewer moves through the painting new spaces emerge.

‘the choice of the location and the many different factors and conditions it entails have influenced the development of the painting, just as the permanently shifting lines of sight of the viewer and unexpected interactions with the work affect our ways of perceiving it in the exhibition setting,’ explain the exhibition’s curators, udo kittelmann and gabriele knapstein. ‘in this sense, the work’s title, ‘it wasn’t us’, can be understood as a reference to the inherent complexity and unpredictability of a given situation, whether it be the conditions under which artists create their work, or the conditions under which it is later viewed.’

‘the results of our actions are always influenced by unexpected moments and experiences as well as blind spots which later serve to define a situation,’ the curators continue. ‘not every consequence of each action or every aspect of the resultant situation can be predicted in advance, yet it is our task to assume responsibility for the complete situation.’

a painting by katharina grosse can appear anywhere. her large-scale works are multi-dimensional pictorial worlds in which splendid color sweeps across walls, ceilings, objects, and even entire buildings and landscapes. grosse’s other projects include the transformation of an abandoned beachfront building in new york and an exhibition in shanghai.

project info:

name: it wasn’t us
artist: katharina grosse
curators: udo kittelmann, gabriele knapstein
location: hamburger bahnhof – museum für gegenwart – berlin
dates: june 14, 2020 to january 10, 2021

The post katharina grosse immerses former railway building in explosive kaleidoscopic painting appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

katharina grosse subdivides the 1,500 sqm museum into five zones, each occupied by a large-scale installation produced almost entirely on-site. mumbling mud leads the audience through an labyrinthine passageway that evokes a sense of spectrality. the ambiguous, multicolored forms sprayed across varying structures and draping cloths installed at the five zones lend a sensation of bordering the familiar and uncanny. the exhibit ruminates on the strangeness of an ever-changing city that cannot be delineated with simple contours. the name of the exhibition refers to this fundamental ambiguity. ‘mumbling’ implies an intermediate state between speaking and silence, and ‘mud,’ an intermediate state between the solid and the liquid.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

installation view of katharina grosse: mumbling mud at chi K11 art museum, shanghai, 2018. photo by JJYPHOTO. courtesy of K11 art foundation and galerie nächst st. stephan, vienna © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn.

project info:

public viewing dates: 10 november 2018 – 24 february 2019, open daily 10am – 8pm

exhibition venue: chi K11 art museum, B3, K11 art mall, 300 huaihai road central, huangpu district, shanghai, china

artist: katharina grosse

curator: venus lau, artistic director of K11 art foundation

curatorial adviser: ulrich loock

The post katharina grosse presents ‘mumbling mud’ exhibition in shanghai appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

photo by zan wimberley (also main image) 
all images courtesy the artist and gagosian © katharina grosse and VG bild-kunst, bonn 2017

yielding a total transformation of carriageworks historic structure, the installation challenges the conventions of painting — a theme prevalent throughout grosse’s artistic oeuvre. the artist first introduced the idea of voluminous fabric into her painting back in 2014, and has developed the technique since. ‘I was fascinated by the thought of folding space,’ grosse described. ‘I was interested in taking this vast surface and shrinking it by folding or, actually, hiding the entirety of what’s there. I understand a painting as something that, as we view it, travels through us and realigns our connections with the world.’ in sydney, dramatic drapes and folds surround visitors in a saturated scenography of spray painted shapes and lines.

photo by zan wimberley

‘the horse trottted another couple of metres, then it stopped’ is presented free to the public from now through april 8, 2018 as part of sydney festival 2018, and marks the third in the schwartz carriageworks series of major international visual arts projects.

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by steven seiwert, courtesy of the golden mean

photo by zan wimberley

The post spray guns & suspended fabric: step inside katharina grosse’s otherworldly color canvas appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

photo by anders sune berg

focusing on depictions of nature throughout history, the ARoS triennial is divided into three sections: ‘the past’, which examines the nature’s relationship with both landscape and man; ‘the present’, which considers nature in the context of the modern city; and ‘the future’, which explores the artistic reaction to environmental changes. forming part of the latter, grosse’s painting has been conceived as a ‘mobile garden’. 

image © studio grosse

‘my paintings can land anywhere at any time, so can your thoughts, and therefore they transform your understanding of every moment from the most intimate to the political,’ katharina grosse tells curator marie nipper. ‘looking at the paintings bids us to understand that things look different every time, even if we console ourselves that we are familiar with a revisited situation.’ the installation remains on view until july 30, 2017.

image © studio grosse

photo by maja theodoraki

photo by maja theodoraki

photo by anders sune berg

photo by anders sune berg

photo by anders sune berg

The post katharina grosse spreads pained pink hues across the danish coastline appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

image © designboom (also main image)

the area surrounding fort tilden was hit hard by the devastating aftermath of hurricane sandy in 2012. in celebration of the ongoing recovery of the peninsula following the destructive impact, MoMA PS1 has collaborated with the rockaway artists alliance, jamaica bay-rockaway parks conservancy, national park service, central park conservancy, NYC parks & recreation, and rockaway beach surf club to present the exhibition rockaway! on the occasion, german artist katharina grosse has realized a site-specific installation at the site’s decaying aquatics building, turning it into a monumental artwork. 

photo by pablo enriquez

grosse reflects the bold and vibrant colors of sunset in the rockaways by spraying brightly colored paint directly onto the structure. her approach — which has seen her color the landscape one of philadelphia’s major transportation routes — highlights the potential of painting as a medium, and accentuates the character of this manmade structure and its natural surroundings. the installation also seeks to memorialize this iconic building, which was rendered structurally unsound by hurricane sandy in 2012 and is set to be demolished in late 2016.

image © designboom

‘in 2008, I saw katharina grosse’s work for prospect.1 in new orleans, where she painted a small house that was abandoned and condemned after hurricane katrina’, said klaus biesenbach, director, MoMA PS1 and chief curator-at-large, museum of modern art. ‘I was deeply moved that a building just waiting to be taken down was given this temporary, proud, and fragile beauty. when I heard that the aquatics building in fort tilden was to be demolished following hurricane sandy, I immediately wanted to invite katharina to do a project at the site.’

photo by pablo enriquez

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

image © designboom

photo by pablo enriquez

photo by pablo enriquez

image © designboom

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The post katharina grosse colorizes abandoned aquatics building in rockaway, NY appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

berlin-based artist katharina grosse is transforming the landscape one of philadelphia’s major transportation routes with a series of seven, vibrantly-colored installations along the city’s rail gateway, visible primarily to passengers aboard passing trains. ‘psychylustro’ utilizes grosse’s unique spray-paint technique to spread intense color across the chosen project sites, unfolding throughout the dynamic course and covering abandoned warehouse walls, small buildings and stretches of green spaces in bold hues. framed through the windows of the moving train, the large-scale public artwork generates a real-time landscape painting that explores shifting scale, perspective and the passage of time.

a passenger aboard the train passes by the pink colored installation outdoors

grosse explains that her work ‘shifts your notion of size through movement, so when you stand in front of it, it’s huge, but when you pass it by on the train it becomes small. this kind of experience — that your life is constantly in that kind of changing mode — is something I’ve always been fascinated by. and this time we have an extra tool, which is the train. in a museum you walk, and that’s the way you move. here, you can fly.’

grosse’s team paint the landscape pink

presented by the city of philadelphia mural arts program, the ephemeral and constantly changing installation will transform over time and — with nearly 34,000 daily viewers on the railway — will be a portal for new audiences to experience contemporary art, transforming a routine train journey into a voyage of the imagination. ‘we really want people to see what we see,’ describes jane golden, mural arts executive director. ‘we see the deterioration, but we also see the beauty, we see the history, we see philadelphia’s past.’ mural arts has now released a map of the project sites, available here.

painting site 3 (drama wall) with benjamin moore acrylic indoor paint

site 5 (trestle)

the artist at the drama wall

site 6 (warehouse)

warehouse painted in white and orange

vibrant hues wash the side of the building

the landscape is transformed by the bold use of color

the railway line site is painted in orange

site 7 (twin walls)

bright green details of site 7

‘twin walls’ covers the abandoned site in lime green

The post katharina grosse colorizes railway landscape for train riders appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

‘just two of us’ is presented by the public art fund whose focus is on art in the public sphere. the artwork, and it’s relationship to the space is iterated by nicholas baume, public art fund director & chief curator: ‘katharina grosse’s hybrid approach to painting and sculpture feels very natural in the context of a public space at the center of a thriving urban area where culture, technology, and innovation intersect.’

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

image by james ewing, courtesy of the public art fund, NY / the artist / johann könig, berlin

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katharina grosse, just two of us, 2013 | acrylic on glass-fiber reinforced plastic
exhibition presented by public art fund; on view at metrotech commons, downtown brooklyn
october 27, 2013 – september 14, 2014

The post katharina grosse sculpts colorful terrain in brooklyn appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

katharina grosse: wunderblock
nasher sculpture center, dallas, texas
on now through september 1, 2013

huge mounds of colorful dirt cover the floor and spill out of the space in katharina grosse‘s new installation ‘wunderblock’. the immersive painted environment is filled from wall to wall with spray painted soil, that visitors are encouraged to walk through and interact with. grosse, who is best known for her intensely vibrant installations that tarp entire surfaces of gallery spaces, doesn’t limit her painting to the traditional proportions of  a canvas —  she uses a spray paint gun to establish her work within interior walls and floors or on building exteriors. ‘wunderblock’ is made up of two parts: the inside exhibition space, a enveloping chroma-filled installation, and two large ‘color-objects’ — colossal, dramatic forms made of glass-fiber reinforced plastic which are placed in the garden under trees.

the immersive installation fills up the entire room

spray paint drips down the gallery walls while mounds of soil sit in the space

spray painted walls and colored soil floors

grosse’s color object near the garden of the nasher sculpture center

one of katharina grosse’s color objects in the garden at the nasher sculpture center

The post colorful mountains of spray-painted soil by katharina grosse appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.