Art Galleries London: Katharina Grosse: Prototypes of Imagination, Gagosian Britannia St

As a true pioneer who has expanded the reach of contemporary painting, Katharina Grosse is famed for her large-scale installations that use chromatic swathes of abstraction to intervene directly into architecture, interiors and landscapes.

In autumn 2017, Grosse mesmerised audiences across the capital, and flooded Instagram feeds with ebullient washes of pigment, when her highly acclaimed installation This Drove My Mother up the Wall opened at the South London Gallery. Now the artist opens her first (and long overdue) major gallery exhibition at Gagosian’s largest site on Britannia Street, near King’s Cross.

In line with the artist’s penchant for in-situ painting, the exhibition centres around one monumental work of oceanic magnitude that responds directly to the lofty, luminous gallery space. Painted on loose cloth that is dynamically draped on the walls and spills to the floor, the effect is a sensory feast. In Gagosian's adjoining galleries hang eleven further technicolour canvases. Unlike the main exhibit, these canvases are framed, and displayed with plenty of room to breathe.

Across the exhibition the artist uses her characteristic stencils to contrast blazing mists of visceral colour with negative space, creating a hallucinatory vision. As Grosse has commented on her work: ‘There is no boundary between reality and imagination. To imagine is to realise’.

Gagosian is one of the best art galleries London plays host to now, and this is one free exhibition not to be missed. Make sure you visit Gagosian Britannia Street before your Instagram feed is truly saturated with Grosse’s Kaleidoscopic genius.