ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Katharina Fritsch
Katharina Fritsch mines the history, myths, and fairy tales of Germany as well as her own thoughts and dreams to explore the nature of human perception and experience. She draws her subjects from everyday life and alters them through unexpected shifts in scale and color, creating objects that blur the boundaries between the ordinary and the deeply symbolic.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Katharina Fritsch’s work has taken many forms, including large-scale public sculpture, intimate sound pieces, and multiples—artist-designed objects produced in limited or unlimited editions. Whatever the format, Fritsch’s works speak to the ways in which images can plumb our deep-seated desires, memories, dreams, and nightmares. Katharina Fritsch presents her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in Matthew Marks Gallery. At the center of the gallery, standing more than 365 cm tall, is “Hahn und Podest” (2013/2019), a sculpture of a bright blue rooster atop a vivid green circular pedestal. The rooster can be a symbol of pride, power, and courage or posturing and macho prowess. In 2010 art historian Jean-Pierre Criqui wrote about Fritsch’s depictions of animals: “The way the artist uses them, but also the situations in which she places them, gives them ambiguous powers at the intersection of several tendencies: humanity’s ancestral fears and superstitions, as expressed, for example, in tales and legends; the intensities of totemic thought and of its images; and the uncanny and Freudian dream study”. Accompanying it, and painted the same bright blue, is “Zwei Männer” (2019). Fritsch has said, “Men have women as their models, so obviously I have men as my models. They are my muses”. Like the rooster, these two men are sculpted in exacting detail, from their shoes to the smartphones in their hands, yet they are anonymous enough to stand in for a gender and a type. Completing the installation is “Stern” (2020), an 240 cm painted-aluminum star mounted on the wall. Conceived as an ensemble, the three sculptures, with their perfect surfaces, appear industrially manufactured. In fact they were made by hand over a period of five years and painted by the artist in her studio. A larger outdoor version of “Hahn”, without the green pedestal, was exhibited in Trafalgar Square in London from 2013 to 2015 and is now installed on the roof of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. A second outdoor version is in the sculpture garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Fritsch has admitted that she enjoys “games with language” and the sculpture’s tongue-in-cheek title knowingly plays on its double meaning. Blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the deeply symbolic, “Hahn” presents an unexpected take on the idea of a traditional public monument.
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, Duration: 13/2-5/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.matthewmarks.com
