Katharina Fritsch’s realistic sculptures dissolve the edges between the ordinary and the uncanny, stirring our deep-rooted dreams and nightmares while awakening childhood memories of religious tales, fables, and myths. Her works – which appear as boldly hued large-scale public projects, strangely scaled sculptures, intimate sound pieces, and multiples – project a confidence that can be interpreted as variably protective or threatening. Cast in dark green polyester from the mould of a stuffed elephant, Elefant / Elephant (1987) reproduces the textures and folds of the mammal’s body with startling exactitude, and its size, clarity of anatomical detail, and colour profile take on a supernatural effect. Here, a profound eeriness arises not only from her twisting of the everyday, but also from her technique. Frequently moulded by hand, cast in polyester, and finished with a matte paint, her sculptures maintain a formal naturalism made strange by the paint’s absorption of light, which gives the surface a mystifying quality. Elefant / Elephant takes on the vestiges of fables of grandeur, intellect, captivity, and matriarchal societies – the core of elephant family structures. Even in Venice, the iconography of elephants looms large: in the 1890s, right before the beginning of the Biennale’s history, an elephant named “Toni” lived on the parkland grounds and was known as “the prisoner in the Giardini.”
Madeline Weisburg
