Katharina Fritsch, 3. Gartenskulptur (Skelettfüsse), 2006, Polyester, paint, 2008, 140 x 40 x 40 cm, 1. Photo (Rosengarten), 1977-2007, Silkscreen print, cintra, paint, 280 x 399 cm, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich.
Katharina Fritsch, Riese, 2008, Polyester, paint, 196 x 95 x 70 cm, 4. Postcard (Franken), 2008, Silkscreen print, cintra, paint, 280 x 405 cm, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich.
Katharina Fritsch, St. Katharina, 2007, Polyester, paint, 170 x 50 x 40 cm, 2. Photo (Efeu) 2007, Silkscreen print, cintra, paint, 280 x 400 cm, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich.
Katharina Fritsch, Frau mit Hund, Ombrellas and Paris-Postcards, 2004, Polyester,aluminium, iron, paint, Installation view Matthew Marks Gallery, 2004, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich. |
|
Kunsthaus Zurich
Heimplatz 1
CH 8001 Zurich
+41 (0)44 253 84 84
Katharina Fritsch
June 3-August 30, 2009
This retrospective devoted to the work of Katharina Fritsch, one of the most significant artists of our day, also includes new pieces by the artist. Famed for her large-scale sculptures, whose hypnotic effect the viewer experiences in the blink of an eye, Fritsch plays with humanity’s primeval ideas, desires and fears. Her most recent art ventures into fresh artistic territory, including erotica seen from the female point of view.
Katharina Fritsch (born 1956) is among the most important artists working today. Her works — three-dimensional pictures only identifiable as sculptures on second glance — are energetic presences to be found in numerous public and private collections. With their succinct visual speech, works such as Warengestell mit Madonnen (Commodity Rack with Madonnas), 1989, Tischgesellschaft (Company at Table), 1988, and Elefant (Elephant), 1987, firmly anchor themselves in the collective memory of the viewing public and are among the some 80 objects comprised by the retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where the artist has already been seen in the thematic exhibitions Hypermental (2000) and Signs and Wonders (1995), both of them, like the present show, curated by Bice Curiger.
From our vantage point in the present, we can make out an impressive coherence and profundity of subjects and motifs in Fritsch’s oeuvre, a good twenty years in the making. Her pictures take up space, sculptural "apparitions" that nevertheless remain ineffable. The viewer grasps them immediately, and yet continues to wrestle with their latent meaning. Her process, which includes expunging any evidence of personality from her sculptural surfaces, meticulously calculating proportions and lending her more recent silk-screened pictures an immaterial cast, reveals Fritsch’s debt to the severity of Minimal Art as well as her interest in artificial and cultural paradigms transcending the individual.
The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich is half composed of more recent and entirely new works, including large-format ‘Raumbilder’ (spatial images), which it presents as a precise interaction between sculptures and ethereally oversized silk-screens. A prominent example is •Frau mit Hund (Woman with Dog)•, 2004, a large ensemble comprising a female figure composed of pink shells, 32 umbrellas floating on the ceiling, and blown-up postcard views, a reference to the complex aura of a city like Paris. With its allusions to Rococo and pop culture, the piece gestures serenely at the difficult subject of simplicity. Meanwhile, as a recent group of works by Fritsch constitutes a curious modern elegy to the subject of the ‘garden’, one of her newest pieces invites the viewer into a ‘meta-bedroom’: in her ‘smiling’ double bed strewn with rose petals and adorned with male pinups, Fritsch ventures with subversive levity into a masculine preserve of art history.
Katharina Fritsch was born in Essen (Germany) in 1956. She studied general and art history in Münster before attending Fritz Schwegler’s classes at the Art Academy of Düsseldorf, and showed her first sculptures in 1979. In the 1980s she frequently took her motifs from the world of commodities. Her international breakthrough came in 1984 at Düsseldorf’s Von hier aus (From Here On) exhibition. In 1988 she exhibited at the Kunsthalle Basel and in 1997 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst. After representing Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale she was the recipient of such major awards as the Aachen Prize for Art (1996) and the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture (2008).
Fritsch lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 2001 she was made a professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster, a post she holds to this day. That same year she was the subject of a major one-woman show at the Tate Modern in London, held in cooperation with Düsseldorf’s K21.
The retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich is the first solo exhibition of Fritsch’s work at a museum in Zurich, and the most comprehensive in Switzerland to date. It is to be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Bice Curiger, Robert Fleck, Suzanne Hudson and Milovan Farronato.
Katharina Fritsch, Tischgesellschaft, 1988, Polyester, wood, cotton, peint, 1600 x 175 x 140 cm, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Loan permanent Dresdner Bank, Frankfurt, © 2009 ProLitteris, Zürich.
Katharina Fritsch, 2008, Photo: Inez van Lamsweerde und Vinoodh Matadin. |
