Color and movement cascade from ceiling to floor in Shifting the Stars, Katharina Grosse’s (b. 1961) latest solo exhibition, presented by the Centre Pompidou-Metz in Lorraine, France.

On view from June 1, 2024 through February 24, 2025, the show occupies the museum’s Grand Nef section, which extends over 65 feet, allowing the artist’s silken fabrics painted with a spray gun to envelop the viewer once they move through an initial painted screen. Grosse, who lives and works in Berlin as well as Auckland, invites audiences to pass through vibrant painted colors before an immersive experience in her world: stepping on the billowing fabric, walking through it, and embracing the feelings of engulfment. Occupying nearly 89,000 square feet, the spray-painted drapery is soft and all-consuming—cloudlike and ethereal.

The installation is a repurposed version of a work Grosse initially crafted for Carriageworks in Sydney, but the impact is nonetheless remarkable. It blends the brashness of abstract expressionism with the subtleties of Farbraumkörper, or “color space bodies,” after the works of Gotthard Graudner, Grosse’s teacher at the Düsseldorf art academy. The artist primarily draws inspiration from a visit to Florence, where she became fascinated by Renaissance frescoes, including the extent to which these works drew from their surrounding architecture. In similar fashion, Grosse began to factor her environment into her artmaking, crafting three-dimensional, in situ installations that interplay with the exhibition space. She abandoned easel and canvas for the walls of gallery and museum spaces, directly spraying on gleaming colors—and consistently experimenting with every corner, protrusion, and arch in that structure.

In Shifting the Stars, Grosse intimately connects with the Grand Nef, creating tension between the softness of the fabric and the bold sweeps of her intricate colors and gestural movements. Suspended from ceiling to floor and spreading across the floor, the drapery is fused to the space by means of large knots, with an exuberant energy urging the viewer to plunge deep into the artist’s psyche. In the lower part of the gallery, audiences will find greenery—ash trees and hornbeams wrapped in the artist’s signature linen—a bridge between human and natural elements, a gateway to her sanctuary.

Once past this gateway, the fabric looms, offering audiences the experience of stepping into a kaleidoscope of color, mood and movement. The walls undulate like a membrane, as a profusion of lines of color seeps into the folds of the fabric broken by splashes of quiet white space. The artist’s sweeping movements are as disorientating as they are optimistic, conveying a sea of paradoxes—overwhelming yet calming, agitating yet soothing, fluid and yet stifling. Scale plays a significant role here and the oversize drapery can be overpowering, yet the viewer’s ability to walk through it freely encourages self-contemplation and exploration. Grosse notes that if the viewer feels small in comparison to the work, they might then seek a space that makes them feel more significant—giving them agency as they determine what they want to see next, or where they’d like to be.

Painting, she notes, has the ability to split habitual connections—to break the bounds of predefined territories and hierarchies. And, because of its ambivalent structure, the Centre Pompidou-Metz so appeals to her. Here in the Grand Nef on the ground floor, it’s like a blank canvas onto which the artist can project her unique handling of color, material, movement and scale. Grosse’s work ultimately resembles a playhouse or a theater set—it’s cinematic—and so it’s only natural that the viewer becomes a performer, or a participant, in the work. It’s no wonder that the Grand Nef also hosted Pablo Picasso’s stage curtain design Parade in 2012.

In Shifting the Stars, Grosse explores spaces that invite interaction. This exploration is also inherent in The Bedroom (2004), a statement on the personal and universal significance of private spaces. Previously a solo exhibition in its own right, this iteration of Grosse’s work encourages viewers to engage with the archetypal space of the bed—an object both familiar and symbolic. Grosse first covered her own Düsseldorf bedroom with spray-paint in the early 2000s, allowing everyday objects—boxes, books, and wall coverings—to accumulate, thereby creating a lived-in, textured environment. In Shifting the Stars, Grosse revisits this concept by depicting the bed’s intimacy in relation to the monumental architecture of the space. Here too the exhibition touches on a desire for personal change and spatial transformation; every surface dimension is covered in paint, and yet the bed commands attention, conveying a need for engagement and exchange. Both Grosse’s bedroom and drapery installations invite audiences to interact with—and move within—their surroundings, taking back control of their own physicality in the process.

Charles Moore is a New York-based author, curator, and art critic. He earned a master’s in museum studies from Harvard University. Moore is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University with a research focus on the life and career of abstract painter Ed Clark. His critical writings have appeared in publications such as Juxtapoz, CULTURED, Artnet, Brooklyn Rail, The Art Newspaper, and Frieze Magazine. He is the author of The Black Market: A Guide to Art Collecting (2020) and Art & Economics (2024). His work has been translated into 15 languages. His forthcoming book, The 24 Hours Interview (2025), will be published by Mousse Publishing.