524 - Katharina Fritsch (born 1956 in Essen)

Katharina Fritsch (born 1956 in Essen) Fly Plastic, highly pigmented acrylic, and bronze. (2000). Approx. 18 x 27 x 20.5 cm. One of only 10 copies. Includes instructions for packaging and handling. Listed on the artist’s website. • A typical animal sculpture by the artist—partly familiar from everyday life, partly unsettlingly alien • Through a sophisticated shift in scale, the unassuming insect mutates into a menacing figure • Katharina Fritsch was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 The “Fly” is one of Katharina Fritsch’s signature animal representations, which also include her famous rat and mouse sculptures. On the surface, the insect is an unassuming creature familiar to everyone. Yet it evokes a wide range of associations: summer, heat, or even transience. It is precisely this ambivalence that characterizes Katharina Fritsch’s entire body of work. She frequently draws on motifs deeply rooted in our collective visual memory. By isolating the subject, rendering it with precision, and—above all—through the disorienting alteration of scale, she strips it of its casual, everyday quality. In the case of the fly, she enlarges an insect measuring only a few millimeters to approximately 25 centimeters. As a result, the insect gains a presence it does not have in reality; the disgust and unease—both of which the insect is capable of evoking—are intensified by the enlargement. The object and the ambivalent feelings associated with it are equally scalable. The artist demonstrates this impressively in her monumental installation, the “Rat King” from 2003 (Schaulager Basel). Katharina Fritsch is one of the most significant contemporary artists; in 2022, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her life’s work. Exhibition: Animals, Haunch of Venison, London 2004, color ill. p. 23; “Gediegenes und Kurioses: Los Carpinteros, Ouyang Chun, and Favorite Pieces from the Olbricht Collection,” Museum Folkwang, Essen 2016, cat. no. 16/5, color ill. p. 160. Provenance: Galerie 20.21, Essen; Olbricht Collection, Germany, acquired from the aforementioned gallery in 2003. Taxation: subject to margin scheme (VAT: Margin Scheme).