Exhibitions 1
Katharina Fritsch (Tate Modern, till 9 December)
Eerily enigmatic
Martin Gayford
In 1987 the citizens of Miinster, a city in Westphalia, were astounded and scandalised by a strange, perhaps blasphemous manifestation in the middle of their town. In the pedestrian precinct there appeared a six-foot-high statue of the Madonna. Nothing surprising in that — especially as Mi.inster is a devoutly Roman Catholic place — except that the statue was bright yellow and made of plastic. It was in fact a work by the contemporary artist Katharina Fritsch. more of whose strange and sometimes fascinating pieces are currently to be seen at Tate Modern.
In the same year as the Madonna, this time for an art gallery, Fritsch came up with a life-size elephant on an oval stand. Again, there was nothing all that unusual about it — it was cast from moulds she discovered in Bonn's natural history muse urn — except for the fact that it was bright green.
In many respects, the green elephant and the yellow Madonna are like cheap souvenirs or toys; but on the other hand they have an unnerving presence. The effect is even stronger in the case of Fritsch's statues of human figures — the 'Monk', the 'Doctor', and the 'Dealer (whom she collectively refers to as the three bad guys). The 'Monk', clad as one might expect in a habit, is painted in an intense black which seems to absorb the surrounding light. The 'Dealer' — a sleazy-looking individual with a pony-tail who might trade either in art or in dangerous drugs — is an equally deep, matt red. The 'Doctor', a skeleton, is white. They could be manifestations from popular fiction — ghost stories, for example, perhaps crime in the case of the 'Dealer' who looks as if he might figure in a contemporary whodunnit — or even cartoons. 'Ghost and Pool of Blood' consists of a real cliché of a white-sheeted spectre accompanied by a translucent plastic puddle of gore.
In 'Man and Mouse', a huge black rodent stands on the bed of a sleeping man. Another celebrated Fritsch piece — represented in this show by only a miniature version — represents a rat-king, that is a group of rats whose tails have become so inextricably knotted that they have to function as a single, complex creature. Not all her work takes the form of human or animal figures, but many of the most powerful pieces in the show do.
There is a touch of pop art about Fritsch's work, and more than a smidgen of surrealism, just as there is an eerie quality about it, and also a tacky one. 'Company at Table', the largest piece in the show, is made up of numerous identical male figures seated at a long table with a brightly patterned tablecloth (in fact all the male figures, in this and other works, are cast from a single model named
Frank). The suggestion is of multiple personalities, or a crowd of doppelgangers, those typical products of the German romantic imagination. Fritsch's imagination seems at once grungy and gothic. (This show is running alongside Surrealism: Desire Unbound, a big exhibition that begins on 20 September.)
But most of all I was reminded of the highly realistic yet often disquieting German religious sculpture of the Middle Ages and the baroque era. There is an echo, it seems to me, in an up-to-date idiom, especially of the figures carved around 1500 by such artists as Veit Stoss, Tilman Riemenschneider and Nikolaus Gerhaert. Those late-mediaeval craftsmen achieved an effect of hyper-realism through carving and then often painting their work.
Fritsch and her assistants cast from stuffed animals and live people, then if necessary scale up and alter the casts to produce the effect she is after (a laborious and technically demanding business, by the way, rather than an easy option). But the effect — of beings at once uncanny and everyday — has something in common with German sculpture of 500 years ago.
Fritsch has not, as far as I know, mentioned Riemenschneider and co. as influences. Nor is her work religious in spirit — the reverse if anything; the 'Monk' is a sinister figure. But one piece in the show consists of a white minimalist cube with a niche at each corner containing the figure of a saint, which suggests that the religious art of the past is part of her imaginative landscape, along with Disney and gothic horror. And she was brought up in Catholic Mfinster with its gothic Rathaus and share of mediaeval sculpture.
Her exhibition is enigmatic and intriguing, and a reminder that Sir Nicholas Serota originally made his reputation two decades ago at the Whitechapel in part by introducing contemporary German art to a
London audience. It confirms that, after a disastrous start with the dreadful Centuty City, exhibitions at Tate Modern arc getting on course. It may take some time, however, to get those galleries to work as well as they should (though this exhibition looks good). According to a radio poll, Tate Modern is already among the bestloved buildings in the country. But artists seem distinctly suspicious about the suitability of its internal spaces for showing art.
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