STUTTGART.- Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is presenting the comprehensive solo exhibition ‘Katharina Grosse - The Sprayed Dear’ in the Kunstgebäude starting 11 april 2025. Three custom created works will be on display in the domed building with the golden stag alongside sculptural works from her early oeuvre that have never been shown before. With the title, the artist refers to the landmark of the extraordinary exhibition venue and plays with the English word ‘deer’ for ‘stag’ - and the English term ‘dear’ for something cherished.


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Katharina Grosse is one of the most significant contemporary artists. She lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Grosse paints her immersive images, executed in spray technique, radically across objects, architecture and entire landscapes. For the Great State Exhibition Baden-Württemberg 2025, she has engaged deeply with the architecture of the iconic central building on Schlossplatz, transforming it into a vibrant, colour-saturated spatial experience. The surfaces of her artworks seemingly or actually merge with the places where they are presented. This is also the case in the impressive 26-metre-high domed hall of the iconic building, where the newly produced aluminium sculpture ‘The Sprayed Dear’ forms the highlight of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to explore the walk-in work with nearly all of their senses. Moving through this colourful space/environment opens up ever-changing new visual experiences for the public, turning Stuttgart into a ‘place-to-be’ for contemporary art starting 11 April 2025.

Born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1961, Grosse has been pushing the spatial and material possibilities of painting for over 30 years, transcending the conventional boundaries of the genre. In doing so, she creates ‘spaces of possibility’, as with all three artworks produced for the exhibition: In addition to the expansive work ‘The Sprayed Dear’, an oversized, white styrofoam sculpture entitled ‘Ghost’ demonstrates the artist's interest in the interplay of shape and surface, while the sculpture ‘Untitled’ draws attention to the three- dimensional qualities of Grosse’s canvas works.

“For me, two-dimensional painting doesn't exist. The canvas itself is a three- dimensional, haptic object and a painting can appear anywhere. On an egg, in the crook of your arm, in snow and ice or on the beach“, says Katharina Grosse. Nevertheless her sculptural work has received little attention until now. The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart addresses this oversight by showcasing the incredible breadth of Grosse's three-dimensional oeuvre to life in an impressive way – from the early material experiments from her student days at the Düsseldorf Art Academy to her most recent works.

“We are thrilled about our major state exhibition with the globally sought-after artist Katharina Grosse, who will create new works for the spectacular architecture of the Kunstgebäude – for us, this is a further step into the future of the Staatsgalerie with even more emphasis on the present“, says the Staatsgalerie director, Christiane Lange.

Curator Hendrik Bündge is also delighted: “I think it's great and courageous of Katharina Grosse to have taken on this special exhibition concept: In comparison, this exhibition spans the arc from the early, experimental, previously completely unknown sculptural works from the 1980s to her latest works, which were created exclusively for Stuttgart. The exhibition is therefore also a revision of the first artistic steps and a confrontation with earlier ways of seeing and thinking“.

Curator: Hendrik Bündge

Curatorial Assistant: Dr. Linda Marie Kirschey

A comprehensive catalogue with illustrations of all the exhibited works and with a first overview of the early, sculptural work will be published to accompany the exhibition. In order to document the impressive installation views in the Kunstgebäude, the catalogue will be published after the exhibition opens in May 2025 and will complete a trilogy of catalogues by the artist (Centre Pompidou Metz, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart).


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