Katharina Fritsch Exhibition

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St.

[Image: Katharina Fritsch "Erdbeere / Strawberry" (2017) Polyester, paint. 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.]

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Matthew Marks presents Katharina Fritsch featuring seven new sculptures, it is the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since 2008.

Fritsch’s sculpture often begins with a familiar image, which she subverts with shifts in scale and color. The exhibition opens with three such objects greatly enlarged: a lantern in pink and black; an egg, half in yellow and half in orange; and an enormous human skull in white. In the second room are a purple spinning wheel, an oversize blue strawberry, and a large red and white snake.

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.”

In the exhibition’s third room is a bronze sculpture of a cowry shell. Standing almost ten feet tall and painted in a bright pale green, it towers over the viewer. Fritsch first used this shape in pale pink as a component of her 2004 sculpture Woman with Dog. Now isolated and greatly enlarged, the shell engages the viewer’s body directly, its serrated aperture both inviting and menacing, while its matte-green finish transforms the organic form into something disquietingly unfamiliar.

As Fritsch explained in a 2002 interview, “I find this game between reality and vision very interesting. I think my work moves backwards and forwards between these two poles. There is still the connection to the real, but at the same time to the unreal.”

Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956) lives in Düsseldorf. She represented Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale and has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at museums across Europe and the United States, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and, most recently, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her monumental outdoor sculpture Hahn/Cock (2013), originally exhibited in London’s Trafalgar Square, is currently on view at the Walker and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.