Katharina Fritsch  7 September to 9 December 2001

Introduction | Visiting Information | Room Guide

One

Witch's House and Mushroom with four balls (1999)
Lexicon Drawings (1996)

The works in this room capture the magic, innocence and danger of fairy tales. Four shiny, coloured spheres, like fortune tellers' crystal balls, are placed on pedestals around the witch's house as if to mark the limits of an enchanted world. The house itself is child-sized and sharp-edged. The mushroom might be a hallucinogen or a poison. Fritsch has staged a scene that is both attractive and menacing.

Her Lexicon Drawings recreate images from folklore as they appear in a 1930s illustrated dictionary. The three series of drawings shown here relate to superstitions, public festivals and family celebrations. They depict, for example, necromancy, the dance around the maypole and New Year's Eve celebrations.

'I was interested in the element that these drawings emanate, of things that are cosy and familiar, but also depressing and disturbing.' (Fritsch)

Two

Ghost and Pool of Blood (1988)

Like many of Fritsch's sculptures, this piece has an ambiguous reality somewhere between the imaginary and the factual. An ethereal apparition is turned into a material object. The form of the ghost comes from draping a sheet over a model. To determine the shape of the pool of blood, the artist lay down on the floor while liquid was poured around her. The puddle produced became the outline for the pool.

'Why should a ghost look like that? Actually we have no idea what they look like. I find it interesting that in this work I have made something real that does not in fact exist.' (Fritsch)

Three

Display Stand with Vases (1987/89/2001)

Fritsch calls the arrangements of objects shown in the next three rooms 'display stands' as if they might be found in a shop rather than an art gallery. This one consists of 145 vases designed by the artist and produced in a factory using cast polyester. Decorated with a picture of an ocean liner they resemble the type of holiday souvenirs available on German cruise ships. Fritsch has made a series of similar works in which she explores her interest in the relationship between high culture and commercial kitsch.

Four

Display Stand (1979-84)
Display Stand II (2001)

Multiples - works made as editions - are an important strand in Fritsch's work. Here,
she arranges various multiples on glass shelves, as if on display in a shop or home.

Each item is one of a larger series she made. The objects might be presented for their commercial or their sentimental value; or perhaps as arcane charms and private fetishes. Display Stand II, which includes a skull and a black snake, conveys a darker mood than the earlier Display Stand, which Fritsch made at the beginning of her career.

'I made my first display stand when I was still very young, twenty-six or twenty-seven. It is full of life, it is even a bit erotic with the flowers and the red pearls. Now I am forty-five... and have to show the other version. At my age one is much more aware of the transience of life.' (Fritsch)

Five

Display Stand with Madonnas (1987/89)

This display stand consists of 288 figurines of the Madonna.
They are copies of those sold in souvenir shops in Lourdes, but they have been painted an acidic yellow. Fritsch is interested in how our experience and understanding of a religious symbol changes when it is mass-produced either as a souvenir or as art.

'The Madonna is just a plaster figure, not Mary herself. To that extent the plaster figure is just as much a thing as a vase. Of course the plaster figure symbolises something, even something unique. The uniqueness disappears in my work, but essentially it disappears long before, in every souvenir shop. And the strange thing now is that every individual plaster figure does retain a certain aura, even in such quantity.' (Fritsch)

Six

Elephant (1987)

Elephant was Fritsch's first large-scale sculpture, and the first to gain her widespread attention. The sculpture was cast in polyester from a stuffed elephant in the Natural History Museum in Bonn. It reproduces every detail of the real animal and differs only in its colour. The peculiar blue-green hue of Fritsch's sculpture makes it seem supernatural. The work has an iconic presence that seems to sum up the essence of the mighty animal. The imposing size of the elephant is dramatised by its position on a plinth, high above the viewer. As with all Fritsch's sculptures, it is important to see the manner of presentation - for example, the choice of plinth and the size of the room - as an intrinsic part of the work.

Seven

Ambulance (1990)

A clinically white room with smoothly finished walls is filled with the noise of an ambulance siren. It is a sound that instantly triggers feelings of anxiety, emergency, suffering and death. Ambulance is one of several 'sound' multiples that Fritsch has made since 1982. She has also recorded croaking toads, a roaring fire and the sound of rain falling on rhododendron leaves. In each case, the aim is to create an environment that evokes associations and memories. She has used smell in a similar way. One work, for instance, involved scenting a stairwell with perfume.

Eight

Heart with Money and Heart with Wheat (1998-9)

These glittering hearts are made up of thousands of identical ears of golden corn and flat, unmarked silver coins. They have a strange presence, creating dizzying perceptual effects
as the viewer's focus shifts from individual components to the whole shimmering field. Fritsch has compared the works to an abstract painting, and likens their hypnotic power to watching ripples in water. These works recall various stories including The Cold Heart by Wilhelm Hauff, Wagner's Rhinegold, and the story of King Midas from Ovid's Metamorphoses. These fables all warn of the seductive, magical and yet dangerous appeal of material riches.

Nine

Company at Table (1988)

Thirty-two identical, life-size men are seated either side of a long refectory-style table. They do not communicate. Each seems lost in thought, in company but alone. Their identical outfits imply a fraternity, which might be that of a monastic order. According to Fritsch,
the arrangement of the men in rows was inspired by figures on church façades.

'I was interested in the nightmare quality of an individual figure suddenly sitting there in large numbers. You have to look, but at the same time your gaze slips away because of the numbers. That is a horrifying image... identity dissolving in an infinite space.' (Fritsch)

Ten

Monk (1999)
Doctor (1999)
Dealer (2001)

Three male figures are dressed in the uniforms of their respective professions: a monk, a doctor, and a dealer. Fritsch takes these symbolic representatives of conventionally male occupations, and gives them a threatening disposition. The clinical whiteness of the doctor-skeleton suggests hygiene and purity; at the same time, he is the incarnation of Death. Monk is an equally ominous figure, seeming to absorb light like a black hole in space. Dealer is one of the artist's most recent works, and is shown here for the first time.
He might be a croupier, drug pusher, financial trader, diplomat or art dealer. Fritsch paints
him red and gives him a horse's hoof, like the Devil himself.

Eleven

Man and mouse (1991-2)

A life-size man is lying motionless in bed. On top of him sits a black mouse. Though massive and monstrous, the animal is still somehow cute and appealing. Man and Mouse recalls Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (1781) in which a male demon, known as an incubus, squats, threateningly, on a sleeping woman.
In Fritsch's sculpture the gender roles are reversed. Here it is a male figure lying in bed underneath his 'Mousi', a German term of affection for a woman. Man and Mouse can be seen as an ironic image of unrequited love, in which a passive male is pinned down by his female lover, or perhaps, more generally, as a representation of fear weighing upon us.

'[This] is an image of a completely unbalanced relationship in which two people are missing each other completely. It is a terrible image, but I find it funny as well.' (Fritsch)

Twelve

Trade Fair Stand with Four Figures (1985/86/2001)

The cubic shape of this work is an ironic comment on the term 'white cube', meaning the classic, white-walled modern art gallery. More specifically, as the title Trade Fair Stand with Four Figures suggests, it also refers to the stands at commercial art fairs. The work was first displayed during an art fair in Zürich. In the style of Gothic architecture, each of the structure's four corners has a niche that holds a statuette. The statuettes represent St. Nicholas, the patron saint of traders. In this piece, as in her earlier Display Stands, Fritsch explores the relationships between art, religion and commerce.

Thirteen

Eight Paintings in Eight Colours (1990-1/2001)

This installation consists of eight monochrome paintings, in identical formats, with gold frames, hung quite low on two facing walls. Fritsch describes it as 'a sculptor's comment on painting'. She turns colours into objects, moving between the illusory space of painting and the real space of sculpture.
The colours presented are all those that have appeared in her work so far. Fritsch's repetition of a single shape, her use of monochromatic surfaces, and the way she incorporates the gallery space as part of the work shows the influence of Minimalist artists of the 1960s.

Fourteen

Child with Poodles (1995-6)

224 black poodles are arranged in four concentric circles. The dogs face toward the centre where a baby is lying on a golden star. A feeling of entrapment and menace is mixed with comic cuteness. It is unclear whether the poodles are protecting the infant (perhaps representing the Christ child) or threatening it. This ambiguous psychological register is a common characteristic of Fritsch's work. For example, it is similar to that of Man and Mouse, another image of confrontation. After she had completed the piece, Fritsch recalled that, in Goethe's Faust, the devil Mephistopheles disguises himself as a black poodle.

'My sculptures can never be totally grasped, like a picture that has something unresolved about it. They stay in your head like an enigma… It's simply a recognition of the fact that life is ambivalent.' (Fritsch)