April 2024, Year XVI, n. 4
Katharina Fritsch
A Sculptur
“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.”
Telos: What is sculpture for you?
Katharina Fritsch: Ideas emerge from my subconscious all the time. Sometimes when I’m in transit, in a car or on a train; others originate in my sleep. I think everything can be a sculpture for me. From the beginning, I wanted to create a kind of middle world that took you behind the object again by yourself, a world that really surprises people like they haven’t seen the object before. Achieving this effect depends entirely on perfection of form. In the two-and-a-half-year-long process of creating the rooster [i.e. the Trafalgar Square sculpture], I moved the tail three times; the chest was especially difficult to get right, as I didn’t want it to resemble the proud chest of Germany’s imperial eagles, nor did I want a weak chicken. Since 2006, I have used a computer at different stages in the development of my prototypes, scanning an object, making a plaster cast I then painstakingly reshape and remodel, then rescanning and reworking several times to get the shape and detailing precise. To rely simply on a scan result in work that is completely flat. I don’t want to be sentimental about this, but to me it has an effect. You lose this third dimension and the sensuality of the materials, the smell and everything. You need that!
Your works between reality and vision.
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. My sculpture often begins with a familiar image, which I subvert with shifts in scale and colour. I insist, typically, each work of mine is moulded by hand, then cast in plaster, reworked, and then cast again in polyester. The polyester form is finished with a matte paint, which absorbs light, giving the sculpture’s surface a disorienting immaterial quality. My sculptures can or should never be totally grasped, like a picture that has something unresolved about it. I hope that they stay in your head like an enigma. That’s how life seems to me and that’s how I depict it.
A blue cock atop the empty Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square. How and why?
It was a pretty quick decision. I had a stuffed rooster toy in my studio. I always looked at it and thought, “One day you have to make a cock sculpture.” But it was a very difficult thing to do because so many artists have done roosters. Picasso, for example. I thought it was totally worn out as an image, so I really wanted to find a new way, a new expression. And it fitted totally with Trafalgar Square. Why? Because of all those sculptures commemorating British military big boys, those very male figures on their pedestals. But it also fits because it has these tail feathers, which are kind of exploding, echoing the form of the fountains. Blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the deeply symbolic, with my ‘Hahn/Cock’ I tried to present an unexpected take on the idea of a traditional public monument.
Düsseldorf art scene. Once upon a time…
Once upon a time, Düsseldorf was one of the centres of the art world. In the 1970s, the picturesque village by the Rhine was home to Joseph Beuys, Jörg Immendorff and Gerhard Richter, while artists like Thomas Ruff, Reinhard Mucha, Thomas Schütte, the photographer Andreas Gursky, and most humbly myself, became residents in the 1980s. German Postmodernism was founded in this town, while the legacy of the above artists ensured that the art of critical deconstruction will forever be associated with it. Then the Berlin Wall fell. Galleries and artists, critics and even a number of collectors moved to Berlin, drawn by cheap rents and uncharted possibilities. For years, the town seemed doomed to wither away at the margins of art discourse. Despite its renowned art academy, expansive institutions, wealth of collectors and wonderful infrastructure, the city was eventually neglected by the international cultural elite.
This seems to be the challenge that faces Düsseldorf in the years ahead: to negotiate between the celebrated but intimidating past with the present. This does not mean necessarily that the spirit of the eighties should be exorcised but rather that it needs to be given a place in the town’s current life. Perhaps this is why I decided to come back, trying to guide the artists of the future. Not to tell them what to shoot, paint or sculpt; but to help them think in opportunities. The artistic potential is there. There are plenty of talented young artists.
Marco Sonsini
Editorial
Our guest for the April issue of PRIMOPIANOSCALAc is quite unique. Her sculptures and installations challenge our expectations on what sculpture can be and make us see familiar objects in a new light. With size manipulations, stylising, smoothing out of figurative elements, and her characteristic use of monochrome colour, Katharina Fritsch alters the meanings of objects. Her motifs are culled from art history and Christian imagery, from flea markets and souvenir shops. With meticulous attention to detail in the production process, she combines traditional sculpting with industrial manufacturing. Her works are often made in large editions, and the same motif is sometimes produced in a variety of materials, colours and sizes. Fritsch studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1977 to 1981. Although she was admitted to the program as a painter, she soon began exploring sculpture, making miniature versions of architectural structures and household objects familiar from her childhood. Fritsch’s maternal grandfather was a salesperson for Faber Castell, and his garage was filled, tantalizingly, with art supplies. “It was a paradise,” she recalls. “I was always fascinated by the pencils with all the colours.” Growing up in Langenberg in the 1950s and in Münster in the ’60s, in the heart of the Ruhr valley, Germany’s heavy industry heartland, art wasn’t an obvious career path. “Maybe my parents were secretly afraid of my never making any money, but they really encouraged me to do that, to paint and to draw,” she says. “My childhood was very sensual. It was a very artistic atmosphere.” And a little gothic: Fritsch kept her religious maternal grandmother company on her many tours of German churches, including the famous 13th-century crypts at Bamberg cathedral. “It’s very impressive when you go as a child into the Catholic churches and you see these figures, and there’s something that’s very cruel about what you see, and I was completely attracted by that,” she says. “Bodies dangling from crosses and skeletons in glass tombs? Yes, you have nightmares, but for an artist’ soul it’s so impressive, so strong.” At the same time, American culture, its music and tacky consumer products, was conquering West Germany. Katharina was a big fan of Mickey Mouse and Barbie. Some parents would have never allowed their children to have that, but her parents or her grandparents were not afraid of things like that.
When her Trafalgar Square rooster was unveiled in 2013, then Mayor Boris Johnson noted the irony that an unofficial emblem of France had taken roost in a place commemorating a British victory in the Napoleonic Wars. Fritsch’s cock, however, knows no nation. “The French think it’s their rooster; the Minnesotans think it’s their rooster. It’s everyone’s rooster,” she says with equanimity.
Awarding Fritsch with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, Cecilia Alemani, the curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, said “Every time I’ve encountered one of Fritsch’s sculptures, I’ve felt a sense of awe and dizzying attraction. Fritsch’s contribution to the field of contemporary art, especially sculpture, has been incomparable.”
PRIMOPIANOSCALAc’s 2024 cover series is inspired by the works of Romano Gazzera, a Piedmontese painter known for his ‘giant’, ‘talking’, ‘flying’ flowers which, along with other iconographic themes connected to historical and collective memory, characterised and distinguished him as the frontrunner of the Italian Neo-floral school.
For Katharina, we made a radical choice. There will be no her on the cover. We elected her iconic work, the rooster, to represent her. The flower that protects it is a blue peony, ultramarine blue that is so reminiscent of the famous Klein blue shade developed by the French artist Yves Klein. Blue that immediately speaks of infinity, of alchemical transmutations, cosmological harmonies and starry landscapes.
Mariella Palazzolo
Katharina Fritsch is a German sculptor. After studying at the University of Münster, she went on to study at the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf. Fritsch was a Professor of sculpture at the Art Academy in Münster in 2001-10, then at the Arts Academy of Düsseldorf, retiring in 2022. Fritsch gained international recognition in the mid-1980s for her blue-green, full-sized sculpture Elephant. She represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1995, 1999 and 2011. Her works have been shown at major museums throughout the world, including Kunstmuseum Basel, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern in London and K21 in Düsseldorf. Her most recognized works are Rattenkönig/Rat King (1993), a giant circle of black polyester rats, included in the Venice Biennale in 1999. Other works include Mönch (Monk) (2003), a stoic, monochromatic male figure, made of solid polyester with a smooth, matte black surface; Figurengruppe/Group of Figures (2006-2008), an installation of nine elements; and Hahn/Cock (2010), a 14 ft (4.3m) cockerel in ultramarine blue shown on London’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth from July 2013 to January 2015. In 2022, Katharina was awarded, together with the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Fritsch, who lives and works in Düsseldorf, was born in Essen, Germany, in 1956.
Marco Sonsini
SocialTelos