Katharina Fritsch

From May 13 to October 30, 2016, Museum Folkwang and the Villa Hügel present an exhibition of works by world-renowned sculptor Katharina Fritsch. Fritsch’s cycle of works is dedicated to Essen, the city of her birth. Derived from historical postcards of views of the city of Essen, these works exemplify Fritsch’s method of intertwining personal recollections and historical events, three-dimensional vision and a collective visual repertoire, all rendered in evocative sculptural tableaus.

For this series, Fritsch manipulates historical postcards of Essen dating from the 1970s and ’80s. Photographed, enlarged and altered using a method of colour screenprinting, the images undergo a process of appropriation and re-appropriation, becoming estranged from their original medium of the postcard. Fritsch is less interested in a search for lost time and more in the way various layers of memory can be transformed and superimposed. To what extent, the artist asks us, are layers of memory encoded through reproductions or narratives? Fritsch depicts the parks of Essen with great casualness. Through a process of intense enlargement and through the ensuing fading of their colour, Fritsch’s images generate spots of unsharpness, which intensify the impression of evanescent memory.

Artificial worlds, manicured parks, lakes and public baths—presented here are the places of public recreation and relaxation. Fritsch combines screenprints of Baldeneysee or Kennedyplatz with her own photographs taken in the 1970s and sculptures to form theatrical, whole-room installations. A three-colour postcard of a national horticultural show in Essen’s Grugapark in 1965 is placed in spatial tension with an archetypical white torso, 1. Gartenskulptur. This work refers to a sculpture by Ernst Conze, encountered by Fritsch repeatedly as a child in a neighbour’s garden. Conze’s sculpture, in turn, bears a noticeable resemblance to a work by Wilhelm Lehmbruck in the collection of Museum Folkwang.

Katharina Fritsch vividly unites the personal and the collective. Her works oscillate between melancholy, light-heartedness and escapism, and between illusion and sublimation. Her reproductions of reproductions may nod to Pop Art’s approach to pictures, but the content of her works moves in another, more lyrical direction entirely. They appear like overlapping souvenirs of the mind, which, paradoxically, fade with each fresh remembrance, only to reform in new guises.

The exhibition is generously supported by E.ON.

Public program
The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of public and educational programs. For the dates, please visit www.museum-folkwang.de or subscribe to our newsletter by clicking here.

Press contact
Anna Littmann: T +49 201 8845 160 / anna.littmann [​at​] museum-folkwang.essen.de