Located in the unlikely American city of North Adams, Massachusetts is one of the country’s premier contemporary arts centres; MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The centre’s expansive Building 5 has been playing host to Berlin-based Katharina Grosse‘s most ambitious US project to date, the sprawling, ethereal installation One Floor Up More Highly. Taking full advantage of the building’s vast space, Grosse plays with the definition of a painting, busting out of the constraints of a canvas and inviting the viewer to become a part of what they’d normally be looking in at from the outside. Like the backdrop to a B-Movie where the inhabits of a distant planet live on LSD instead of water, Grosse’s over-scale installation is liberatingly beautiful. One Floor Up More Highly is a truly monumental work; the spray-painted soil and boulders, that are juxtaposed by searing Styrofoam glaciers, engulf the visitors in a psychedelic landslide of breathtaking presence.

Grosse’s chromatic wonderland is on show at MASS MoCA’s Building 5 Gallery until 1st January 2012.