It is not uncommon for some artists to claim a special connection with and inspiration from Edvard Munch’s visual art. In some cases, a painterly connection can be seen, but when it comes to the German artist Katharina Grosse, who is currently exhibiting at the Munch Museum and is being praised there for her connection to Munch, such an influence goes beyond any visible references. Clearly, the museum’s curatorial staff have allowed themselves to be taken in by the artist’s self-praise and alleged Munch-inspired work.
Katharina Grosse’s paintings and her use of colour in the museum’s galleries are so far removed from Edvard Munch’s artistic qualities that it is provocative and an insult to draw any sort of parallel between them. In this respect, Grosse’s main work in the exhibition, ‘Black Bed’, is the most talentless from an artistic perspective. Here, the artist has defaced both the bed and its surroundings with various shades of spray paint, which nowhere creates boundaries or highlights the meaning of the motif. It is merely the haphazard splashes of spray paint that constitute the work’s colour-chaotic and anti-conceptual function.
Katharina Grosse: Das Bett, 2004. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn. Licence: Use in the media.
To draw a parallel between Edvard Munch’s confident form and colouristic rigour and Grosse’s fluid and boundless boundaries is, from an interpretative-theoretical perspective, a sign of artistic ignorance. The artist may well have been filled with strong emotions, but it is not unlikely that these find expression in spray paint on walls, furniture and floors. Whether this constitutes art is an entirely different matter. In that case, the artist must transform those emotions into artistic qualities and aesthetic meaning. Given the way the spray paint is used here, it is more natural to regard the result as visual vandalism.
Emotions in themselves may be strong or weak, but they possess no specific qualities or means capable of structuring them in an artistic direction. When one looks at Katharina Grosse’s spray-painting technique and her arbitrary distribution of colour, the entire project appears to be a manifestation of the art institution. It is therefore not the artist who imbues the museum with aesthetic qualities, but the Munch Museum that bestows artistic prestige upon Katharina Grosse, particularly when she boasts of her deep interest in Edvard Munch.
With this exhibition, the Munch Museum is injecting institutional expertise into an artistic practice that possesses minimal aesthetic qualities. It has surely cost a pretty penny, and this at a time when the Munch Museum is facing major financial difficulties. Why, then, pour more money into a completely uninteresting artist who is also miles away from Edvard Munch’s painterly genius?
The lengthy curatorial text, which draws historical parallels in Katharina Grosse’s uninspired artistic practice, largely consists of harping on about trivial themes. The bed recurs as a dreary theme the artist never seems to tire of. Not so strange, perhaps, as she never manages to achieve anything specifically artistic at the bedside. Instead, she treats the bedside setting with colouristic fury and spiritual discontent. Something the curatorial text refers to as ‘a painterly poetics’. Imagine a painterly poetics that the artist has, on no visual level whatsoever, managed to implement in her exhibited works. For here, the three core criteria of poetics are missing: mimesis, catharsis and anagnorisis, which are fundamental to any poetics.
Now the exhibition also consists of paintings and colour-painted walls. It helps to move away from the traumatised bed, but there is no longer any spark in the paintings or the colour-splattered walls. This is an artist running on empty, whom leading art institutions can fill with their own superficial system of norms. It is a pity that the Munch Museum has developed in this direction. They should have more than enough with Edvard Munch and his mastery of painting. Whilst he may not be particularly fashionable, he has created timeless works.
The Munch Museum:
Katharina Grosse: Untitled, 2004. © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2026. Licence: Use in the media.
Katharina Grosse: ‘Das Bett’,
Installations, paintings, wall paintings, etc.
Valid until 3 January 2027
