Katharina Fritsch
Fritsch is no stranger to repetition – indeed, many of her works exist as multiples, shown together, apart, or in strange tableaux with other objects. Such is Hahn/Cock, a small replica of a public sculpture. The brilliant blue rooster first appeared on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, in 2013. It has since appeared elsewhere – most notably in the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and on the roof of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Where those works were monumental in scale, this version stands just under a metre high. Set on its lurid green base, the cockerel is at once lifelike and distinctly unreal, its interpretations as symbol various and contradictory. To the artist, however, the pleasure of the work is not in its import as sign but in the gestalt of its image, electric blue against the green.
b.1956, Essen
There is an austere precision to Katharina Fritsch’s sculptures, a sense of her works having arrived fully formed into the world. Their smooth, matte finish is without flaw, their paint applied with skilful flatness. The objects Fritsch sculpts are borrowed from life – a hat, a poodle, a disembodied hand – made strange in scale and colour. Each object is painted a single shade, the colours more often bright or a deep, velvet black. Cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, calamine pink – her colours non-sequitur to their subject. With their visual wholeness, Fritsch’s objects appear as uncertain symbols. The artist’s apple is any apple and every apple, the pictorial sign of apple, the apple from the Garden of Eden, from Snow White, from the greengrocers. At once familiar and strange, these bold sculptures appeal to both literal and metaphorical interpretations. Fritsch makes apparent the psychic weight of even the most quotidian of objects, revealing their collective and personal resonance.