Over the years, Art Basel has cultivated a unique relationship with the city, extending its presence beyond the Messe’s walls to actively engage with public space. As Maike Cruse told Observer in an interview ahead of the opening, “In June, it’s impossible to be here and not feel Art Basel’s presence, whether you’re walking across the Messeplatz or stumbling on a Parcours installation in the middle of town.”
This year, for the first time, the Messeplatz commission was awarded to a painter. German artist Katharina Grosse transformed the square with CHOIR, a monumental in-situ work shaped by a vivid flux of fuchsia paint. Renowned for her spatial and immersive approach, Grosse pushes against the lines between painting, sculpture and environment, creating enveloping, anarchic abstractions that resist all forms of traditional framing.
Using industrial spray guns to apply acrylic in saturated bursts, Grosse treats paint as a sculptural material, letting it cascade across surfaces and objects without constraint but with the velocity of intuition and urgency. For CHOIR, it took her six days of endurance and improvisation to cover the entire site from every possible angle, maintaining a seamless visual continuity as she moved across its shifting levels. Her team assisted in recharging the equipment throughout the process, as crowds of art collectors and industry professionals passed through the transformed plaza on their way to the fair.
The choice of color, Grosse tells Observer, was rooted in color psychology: fuchsia is the most visible hue to the human eye in outdoor conditions. “It has to really make you very alert, because the fair is the most important in the world. And everything craves attention,” she says. “I wanted to create something that really sparks your attention to the utmost.”
SEE ALSO: Art Basel’s Soft Opening Belies Strong, Swift Sales Across Tiers
As curator Natalia Grabowska explains, this overflow of color momentarily alters our experience of reality, disrupting any perception of the Messeplatz as a familiar site of passage and gathering. It fractures the regularity of the surrounding rationalist architecture defined by strict geometric volumes into something more organic: bodies that embrace formlessness, disorder, instability and uncertainty as conditions for continuous transformation. “Color becomes anarchic,” Grosse reflects. “It fights all categorizations.”
While the German artist is no stranger to pushing painting beyond the flat surface, working as she often does at architectural and monumental scales, CHOIR is her largest project to date. It was a formidable challenge, she admits, but one that offered unprecedented opportunities to explore color, the body and perception in space. “I found it interesting because here, painting can take so many other elements in it, including many other storylines. Like interacting with a clock, or with the
“I have a tool that allows me to go really fast, to speed up and have a very wide reach,” Grosse says. “Then I go and walk and find out how it works, and I look at it, and I make the next decision.” Focusing on energy becomes, for the artist, a way to embrace entropy and the creatively fertile dimension of disorder—matter in motion and constant flux. Through painting, she creates an unscripted, intangible moment, leaving behind marks, glitches, residue and traces that appear in an ever-evolving possibility of becoming and further growth.
While her practice relies on this intuitive, gestural mark-making that is essential to the spontaneity that defines her approach, the scale of the Messeplatz project demanded a preparatory model to map how the composition would unfold.
What felt different for Grosse this time was the opportunity to engage directly with other visual and spatial elements in the environment. “Whether it is the architecture, the clock or even the sunshine, it continuously, potentially changes everything—from here to here—and the people on it,” she reflects. Yet the intervention remains rooted in her fundamental understanding of painting. “It enters into dialogue with tradition, and with other people’s works. It comes from fresco painting, you know—painting in public space. I have to ask myself, how could a painting be part of our life?”
When asked how she would describe her approach to painting and its function, Grosse expresses a deep conviction in the medium’s performative power and its ability to activate a simultaneous connection between body and mind. “I think painting nowadays is an image that has such a strong relationship to everything in our body,” she concludes. “Here in Basel, you’re literally taken into the painting. You enter the image with your whole body, as it navigates and resonates with it. And that’s what I want to do. I want to engage you and involve you, with all your thinking and your experiences, in your life.”
