Spray Paint, Masked: A Painter Reads Two New Reviews of Katharina Grosse at White Cube

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 26, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Spray Paint, Masked: A Painter Reads Two New Reviews of Katharina Grosse at White Cube TLDR. Two new London reviews call Katharina Grosse’s White Cube show an explosion of spray. At the bench, the same work is the opposite: spray paint is masking, and Grosse is one of the most controlled painters working at scale. I have been reading the new round of Katharina Grosse coverage all week. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith wrote “Spray-Gun Extravaganza” for Frieze on 14 May. Claire Parsons followed for Arts Hub on 19 May. The show, “I Set Out, I Walked Fast”, runs at White Cube Bermondsey until 31 May. Both reviews land on the same words, extravaganza or explosion, and both are mostly right about what the room is doing. What I want to do here is read what the spray gun is actually doing at the bench, because the reviews keep using the language of release, and the work is the language of control. The first specific I noticed: Parsons writes that “spray paint hangs over everything in soft layers, with a fine particulate haze settled over soil, bronze, canvas and wall with equal insistence.” That sentence is true and is also the conservator’s first headache. Acrylic pigment driven through an industrial spray gun atomises into particles fine enough to settle on every surface they reach, including the soil floor of the North Gallery earthwork. The visual effect is a single chromatic field. The bench truth is that the field exists for the run of the show and disassembles when it closes. The soil leaves with the pigment locked in it. The bronze gets cleaned to a permissible degree. The canvas keeps the surface but loses its neighbours. The mask is where the painter actually decides The detail neither writer pulls on hard enough is the masking. Parsons notes that Grosse “often masks parts of the canvas before spraying, leaving behind hard-edged voids once the coverings are removed,” and that these blank passages “reveal how constructed these apparently spontaneous painting s really are.” That sentence is the key. Grosse is a control painter who happens to use a spray gun. Spray painting reads as gesture because the gun travels fast and the colour arrives at the surface in something close to automatic-writing motion. But every mask Grosse lays down is the opposite of automatic writing. Masking is a decision made in advance, executed with measurement, and removed with calculation. The “voids” are not absences. They are the parts of the painting the artist composed first. The sprayed colour is what fills around them. Earlier coverage of the show quoted Grosse saying the spray gun lets her “extend her body beyond its reach, as far as her eyes can see.” That sounds like freedom and it is partly freedom. But the operative half of the sentence is “as far as her eyes can see.” Grosse paints the wall she has already mapped. The size of the canvas is the size of her looking. Spray-gun work at this scale is not gesture released into ambient spac