The Brooklyn Rail

For decades, the German artist Katharina Fritsch has displaced the archetypal through scale, materiality, generalized form, and color. To stand before or walk around her works is to encounter something that at first appears familiar: a designer vase and an inexplicably bifurcated seashell—both oversized—then a towering brick smokestack, a four-door sedan hauling a caravan. The truly enigmatic piece is a scaleless, long dark-green beam-like form with a half-pipe channel running along its underside, titled Tunnel (1979/2025). Each work’s non-descriptive monochromatic color and surface remains disparate, inhibiting these objects from being converted into symbols or signs. These images and their properties do not necessarily give way to anecdotal texts, though they offer this as a possibility. Unlike Robert Therrien’s trompe-l’oeil enlargements of tables, chairs, and dishes, Fritsch’s forms are already generalized, typological. Their monochrome surfaces and refusal of detail block any easy passage into anecdote, even as they draw on the same repertoire of domestic and industrial things. This is not a failure but one of the conditions the work generates: what is seen, what might be known or said, and what remains undetermined.

Beneath these works’ geometry lie thematic coherences—inhabitation, shelter, domesticity. Their typological forms are distilled to their most legible, generic profiles, yet their volume and non-descriptive monochromatic surfaces refuse these associations even as their shapes invoke them. Meanwhile, their uncalibrated shift in scale addresses the viewer’s body. In this, the gap between form and content—color against geometry, thematic reference against the abstract—operates formally, leaving us no choice but to judge them aesthetically. No reading achieves closure. There are irreducible encounters that resist conceptualization; these are intuited. As such, inferred thematic unity functions structurally without reconciling the distinctions between what the image-form proposes and what it is. Each work is all of these things and more.

While these works are image-based, what Fritsch takes from Minimalism is a vocabulary of specificity—exact measurements, material fact, visual clarity. Yet she deploys this specificity against fixity itself. Indeterminacy becomes her rigor. The forms in the present exhibition are up-scaled representations of commonplace objects, abstracted into generalized volumes. They are recognizable as such. The dissociative color complicates what has already been abstracted. Her work inhabits this condition. The familiar becomes uncanny. Recognition arises and falters. The forms suggest their origins—this was cast from an object, a thing encountered in ordinary experience, or perhaps it was designed outright by Fritsch.

Here one might seek refuge in a formalist reading. Her works are cast in vinyl ester resin and then painted with an even, opaque finish. The smokestack (chimney) becomes a freestanding vertical, an orangey-red, brick-like cylindrical form—a fragment of industrial architecture. The automobile, rendered in black vinyl ester, and the caravan in white read as a study in contrasting forms. A form may suggest a truncated column, yet its color renders it unfamiliar. Color operates phenomenologically, not ornamentally. It visually flattens the dimensionality that the scale proposes. These things come to occupy the space between recognizable object and abstract form yet remain both and neither. Their undecidability persists because it is intrinsic to the work’s being. It is what it is. It is what you stand before. It is both and neither. Through such structural operations, they generate psychological conditions: disorientation, estrangement, a low-level unease, as well as a compelling pull that is difficult to resolve. To read these works purely as formal is already to assign them an identity, to confuse how they are with what they are.

To say that the work is “unresolved” does not suggest that it is incomplete or that resolution remains a possibility. These works operate within conditions they do not govern, with a gap that does not close because closure is not what is at stake. What is at stake is the same play of determinacy and indeterminacy that structures domestic, industrial, and bodily experience in life and in representation. In this, the works are not ambiguous—which implies a vagueness that merely offers multiple readings while retaining the possibility of resolution. Their indeterminacy is precise. It is deliberate, calculated, enacted through specific relationships between form, imagery, and monochromatic material. To this end, Fritsch depends on industrial processes—casting, molding, finishing to near-exacting specification—yet what emerges refuses the rationality implied by their forms and materiality. The gap between form and color is where the work happens. A geometric volume demands one kind of attention: color demands another. The work sustains this without resolving it. Color unifies but does not reconcile; it creates a productive discord.

Within all of this indeterminacy, while there is with some certainty—a criticality to Fritsch’s work—it does not engage in the anecdotal. Nor is her work a form of social critique. Both require foreknowledge of what is opposed. While a case might be made for such readings, seemingly, it does so by operating within the gap between what form generates and what comprehension asserts or assigns to it. Subsequently, these works are not a subjective mishmash of elements, they are political. What they do is engage in the economy of power by exposing how objectification, identity, and judgment operate, consciously and unconsciously. Each element operates as an independent entity, nor do they cohere into a singularity. Nor do they submit to one another. Each encounter produces a gap—within which form meets perception, materiality generates cognition and familiarity becomes either comprehension, or a false friend. Fritsch’s works exist within this economy, not because she seeks to reconcile these conditions, but because they are intrinsic to their being. This is what stands before you.