Artist Research

Katharina Fritsch is a German Sculptor and university professor. Katharina has work on display in the MoMA sculpture garden this summer.

Her work focuses on the multiple and the produced. She creates detailed models of her sculptures and ships them out to be fabricated according to her specific instructions. When she has received the factory fabricated objects she then casts and paints them using common production materials.

The final products are then arranged in a narrative fashion in real space. The objects do not move, they are not accompanied by anything except the occasional title, yet they still have a quality of innate human story telling mostly grounded in western mythologies.

In her work “Figurengruppe” she explores theory concepts like color, composition and thematic elements to create a unique environment that feels as grounded in a surreal realm of the arcane as any karesansui.

In her other work “Rat King” she explores how monumental scale, repetition and multiplication can be combined together to create an environment. In this Rattenfänger-channeling piece, Katharina makes use of prior knowledge of children’s tales as a clue for deciphering the narrative of her piece.

            Studying Katharina’s work will be influential in my art making for the final project because it instills in me a great desire for compositional perfection and a greater appreciation for the balance of thematic and formal juxtapositions within a composition

Paul Chan is a Hong Kong artist that has been working with light and projection and their impact on viewed environments. He showed he projection “Sade for Sade’s Sake” at the Venice Biennial, 10 years after Katharina. His work comments on social issues and mankind’s reaction with itself and with the environment where it exists.

His projections have a surreal voyeuristic quality that fulfills the visual needs of the viewer. From the videos I have seen of his projections I get a sense that the space where he is projecting becomes all encompassing. I also really appreciate the non-standard aspect ratio of his work; this lends the work a more substantial and well thought-out mystique.

What I can gain in my work from Chan is his use of color fields and non-figurative shapes to heighten the environmental sense of his work. His inclusion of these non-figurative shapes grounds the image in a reality and causes tension with pictorial semiotics, which cause the viewer to engage more in the artwork.