At White Cube Bermondsey, until 7 June 2026, Katharina Grosse returns with I Set Out, I Walked Fast, a show that invites viewers to ‘dive into the artworks’. This is painting as impact rather than image, colour as something that happens to space, rather than sits within it.

It marks her first exhibition with White Cube since 2002, and her first since joining the gallery’s programme, but there’s nothing retrospective about it. Instead, it reads like an acceleration: a continuation of a practice that has long pushed painting beyond the frame, beyond the wall, and now fully into architecture itself. The gallery doesn’t host the work so much as absorb it.

For Grosse, paint is an autonomous, non-referential medium, one granted ‘a sense of independence, of freedom’. Grosse’s method is as immediate as it is physical. Industrial spray guns replace brushes; gestures are fast, sweeping, unedited. What emerges is a series continuous fields.

Across Bermondsey’s vast interiors, canvases, sculptural elements, and direct interventions collide without hierarchy. Surfaces no longer separate work from space; they fold into each other. Walls become carriers of pigment. Alongside new works made in her New Zealand studio, Grosse brings rarely seen pieces from her archive, creating a kind of temporal layering.

As she explains, ‘It’s hard to negotiate seeing both parts at the same time’. Grosse describes these works as ‘direct’ and ‘unfiltered’, becoming ‘a site rather than a pictorial space’. A visceral show in London!