A new group, a peculiar modern elegy, is devoted to the subject of the garden. Integrated into it are also a variety of new sculptures, which (true to form for Fritsch) are in fact meta-sculptures. These are works of art that galvanize memory, works that seem familiar at first sight. There is for example the sculpture of Saint Katharina, posed before an image of blue ivy; or the white female torso: surely we’ve seen it before in some park or other, if only half consciously. It is an imbrication of worlds. The grey giant standing before a furrowed green valley reminds us of the origins of mythology, while at the same time his life-like appearance lends him something of the everyday. We feel as if we’ve seen him somewhere before. Perhaps the mythical giant lives near us, and works as a captain on the Lake of Zurich? The mood of the piece captures the colourfully exaggerated ambiguity of psychological extremity. The visual world of parks and gardens in Germany of the 1950s and 1960s is also a clear gesture toward the artist’s memories of her own childhood, in a post-war atmosphere marked by an ambivalent oscillation between the emphatically anodyne and the latently grisly, between solemn ceremony and trauma.
In one of her latest groups, Fritsch ostensibly invites the viewer into a bedroom containing a ‘sweetly smiling’, confetti-strewn ‘French’ bed. It is as if a bridegroom, in an access of creative anticipation, had arranged the brightly coloured confetti in the shape of a heart, eyes and mouth, and thus spelled out words of welcome for his bride. The blown-up beefcake on the wall by the bed, meanwhile, signals Fritsch’s venture into a masculine preserve of art history, a woman entering a man’s terrain with subversive levity. The most shameless thing about this space is its lack of value judgement, its aesthetic chaos and the blissful detachment, the vitality with which it seems to have shed any hint of vulgarity.
As a counterpoint, meanwhile, a second room offers sexuality at its most infernally expressive. Once again, Fritsch here uses ‘found’ images, plucked, as it were, from a collective visual archive. The commentator is at a loss whether to argue with or against Freud at the sight of these devastating discoveries. Originally published in 19th-century magazines, from the age in which the image was beginning to be mass reproduced, they offer such scenes as a woman plummeting into a crevasse with her skirts billowing around her, or a man looking on in horror as a gigantic snake devours his female companion.
One of Fritsch’s most beautiful new sculptures is mounted on a modelling table like those used by artists for centuries: a lurid orange octopus, an organic ornament, spreads its pleasingly arched tentacles out – in one of which it grasps a little figure in a diving suit, as if it were a plaything…
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In one of her latest groups, Fritsch ostensibly invites the viewer into a bedroom containing a ‘sweetly smiling’, confetti-strewn ‘French’ bed. It is as if a bridegroom, in an access of creative anticipation, had arranged the brightly coloured confetti in the shape of a heart, eyes and mouth, and thus spelled out words of welcome for his bride. The blown-up beefcake on the wall by the bed, meanwhile, signals Fritsch’s venture into a masculine preserve of art history, a woman entering a man’s terrain with subversive levity. The most shameless thing about this space is its lack of value judgement, its aesthetic chaos and the blissful detachment, the vitality with which it seems to have shed any hint of vulgarity.
As a counterpoint, meanwhile, a second room offers sexuality at its most infernally expressive. Once again, Fritsch here uses ‘found’ images, plucked, as it were, from a collective visual archive. The commentator is at a loss whether to argue with or against Freud at the sight of these devastating discoveries. Originally published in 19th-century magazines, from the age in which the image was beginning to be mass reproduced, they offer such scenes as a woman plummeting into a crevasse with her skirts billowing around her, or a man looking on in horror as a gigantic snake devours his female companion.
One of Fritsch’s most beautiful new sculptures is mounted on a modelling table like those used by artists for centuries: a lurid orange octopus, an organic ornament, spreads its pleasingly arched tentacles out – in one of which it grasps a little figure in a diving suit, as if it were a plaything…
St. Katharina, 2007
Polyester, paint
170 x 50 x 40 cm
Photograph 2 (Ivy), 2007
Oil-based ink and acrylic on plastic panel
280 x 400 cm
Giant, 2008
Polyester, paint
195 x 95 x 70 cm
Postcard 4 (Franconia), 2008
Oil-based ink and acrylic on plastic panel
280 x 405 cm
French Bed, 2009
Aluminum, wood, paint, paper
208 × 168 × 50 cm
Newspaper Illustration 2 (‘A Terrible Fall’), 2007
Oil-based ink and acrylic on plastic panel
200 x 137 cm
Octopus, 2006/2009
Metal, polyester, paint, wood
140 × 120 × 120 cm