Katharina Fritsch belongs to the generation of German artists that emerged from North Rhine-Westphalia to achieve international success in the 1980s. The role of the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, the local galleries at the time, and key exhibitions such as Von Hier Aus [Up from here] (1984, Düsseldorf) can hardly be overestimated.
Raised in a strict Catholic milieu in Münster, Fritsch studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1977 to 1984, alongside Andreas Gursky, Thomas Schütte, Martin Honert and Thomas Ruff, amongst others. She became a professor of sculpture at her alma mater in 2010. After initially devoting herself to painting, Fritsch turned to sculpture in 1979. Von Hier Aus put her on the international map. In 1987, Fritsch showed two works that will forever link her with monochrome sculptures. In a museum in Krefeld, she installed a life-size cast of an elephant, and during Skulptur Projekte Münster, she placed a large, lemon-yellow statue of the Madonna in a pedestrian shopping street. Fritsch selects, reproduces and manipulates objects from her everyday surroundings and elevates them to art. In so doing, her work is akin to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’.
Fritsch, whose grandfather was a representative of the Faber-Castell painting and drawing supplies company, has been fascinated by colour since childhood. Yet she adheres to a monochrome approach: ‘Ein Ding, eine Farbe’ [one thing, one colour]. By applying a blanket colour to ordinary, multi-coloured objects, Fritsch gives them a powerful, abstract appearance. Paradoxically, colour was always of secondary importance in twentieth-century sculpture, which was largely non-figurative. Because of their matt, monochrome hue, Fritsch’s sculptures are like signals: they are easy to read and quickly imprint themselves in people’s memories. Their dull paint skin is non-reflective, which makes the works stand out from their surroundings.
The objects that Fritsch selects are universal, known worldwide. Yet her art often evokes mixed feelings. The statue of the Madonna from Münster, derived from a commercial souvenir figurine but equally inspired by the golden Madonna from Fritsch’s hometown of Essen, was attacked by vandals on several occasions. Others revered it as a genuinely sacred object. The number eight, or a multiple thereof, is a fetish for Fritsch: it resembles the infinity sign. Fritsch is also fixated on infinity. She therefore produces the majority of her sculptures in unlimited editions. The Madonna that she made for Münster is not a unique work: Fritsch has also made countless smaller, identical versions that may (or may not) stand alone or form larger, group compositions.
Less well-known are Fritsch’s ‘sound multiples’, registrations of simple sounds, and her large, monochrome screen prints, reproductions of postcards, her own photographs and illustrations from newspapers. The silkscreen series Essen (2005-07) is derived from postcards that Fritsch’s grandfather sent her from her hometown of Essen in the 1970s and 1980s. The artist often selects motifs that relate to personal memories. By making reproductions of reproductions, Fritsch is aligning herself, to a certain extent, with Pop Art.
