Installation view, Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly, 2010. On display at MASS MoCA through October 2011. Images courtesy MASS MoCA.

A painting's scale has always had a direct impact on the viewer, but never quite like this. For her most ambitious project thus far in the United States, Katharina Grosse has created a dramatic, epicly-scaled (and surprisingly romantic) installation that almost entirely consumes the massive Building 5 gallery at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. The paint normally found on her large-scale canvases has been removed and replaced with monumental, undulating fields of chromatic intensity and texture in a giant gallery, instead using painted piles of soil and large Styrofoam "shards," which viewers can walk around.

Grosse has long turned installation sites into three-dimensional investigations of paint, brandishing a spray gun in lieu of a brush. Her spray-painted mountains of soil dot the landscape of the gallery much in the same way that piles of pigment create surface texture on a canvas, simultaneously pushing the limits (and definitions) of painting, sculpture, and installation. One Floor Up More Highly, her large-scale exhibition for MASS MoCA, takes Grosse's interest in the function of painting in an expanded field and, as the title suggests, kicks it up a notch. More pics after the jump.  —Evan J. Garza

Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly is on display at MASS MoCA through October 2011.