Katharina Fritsch’s stylish, thirty year-long art practice was the focus of a large scale exhibition at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen, produced in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zurich. Born in Essen, Germany in 1956, Fritsch’s practice has clearly been well honed, occupying a difficult position between the mediums of photography and sculpture. She is perhaps best known for her sculptures Rat King (1993), Company at Table (1988) and Baby with Poodles (1995/96); works that utilise repetition and scale to overpower the viewer. These works, I think, are the weakest elements of her practice. Such iconic sculptures have been labelled by critics as transforming the everyday into dreamy or nightmarish scenarios. In this exhibition these works possessed a superfluous romanticism, reminiscent of the worst aspects of Rene Magritte. It was Fritsch’s idiosyncratic use of photographic imagery and her more recent photographic screen-prints that overshadowed her better known work. Although she could be viewed as one of the pioneers of digitally-manipulated formalist sculpture there are those such as Charles Ray, Xavier Veilhan and James Angus who do it much better.
Despite the many readings of her work in terms of its uncanny semiological play, Fritsch seems to be more concerned with the sense of power that permeates our interactions with public space. At the entrance to the exhibition stood an odd collection of sculptures that toyed with the concept of public monument. This idea was further explored in the centre of the exhibition in which appropriated photographic postcards of gardens were enlarged, silkscreened in combinations of pastel colours and installed on purpose-built gallery walls. The particular positioning of these works raised an awareness of how the viewer’s space was subtly restricted. Collectively they summoned up