Düsseldorf based artist Katharina Fritsch exhibited a number of large scale sculptures at Matthew Marks Gallery in NYC for a late spring show. This is another example of where the photos don’t quite capture the size and presence that these pieces have in person.
The obvious draw for me is Auto und Wohnwagen / Car and Caravan 1979/2026, a life size replica of a toy Mercedes car and camper. However all the pieces are incredibly well crafted from aluminum and stainless steel. As hard as I looked, I couldn’t find the slightest surface imperfection.
Also impressive are the logistic consideration that were solved to ship all these pieces from Europe. Fritsch distorts scale with these pieces, the final works are based on enlargements from small models. Tunnel 1979/2025 looks like a piece from a child’s railroad set reimagined as a massive 26 foot long form.
All of these pieces were intended to be outdoor sculptures and that would change the impression from a gallery interior quite a lot. I do like how her work is simplified but still feels real. Auto und Wohnwagen / Car and Caravan takes a few looks realize an actual Mercedes or functioning camper weren’t the basis for either of the sculptures.
One last piece that was cool to see was the scale model of the gallery interior and work used for the planning of the show. This sort of behind the scenes artifact is a rarity and the only other one I can ever remember seeing was for Frank Stella at Jeffrey Deitch
Full Description
Three of the works on view—Auto und Wohnwagen / Car and Caravan (1979/2026), Tunnel / Tunnel (1979/2025), and Schornstein / Chimney (1979/2026)—are based on models that Fritsch originally made in 1979 while still a student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Fritsch exhibited these sculptures together on a standard classroom table, coolly arranged like a showroom display. “When I arrived at the academy, I wanted to make really strong pictures,” Fritsch later recalled. “In those days that struck everyone as unspeakably amusing, particularly since Minimal and Conceptual art were so dominant.”
Almost fifty years later, Fritsch returns to these images on a monumental scale. Auto und Wohnwagen / Car and Caravan is a life-size sculpture of a black car towing a white caravan. Measuring over thirty feet long, the sculpture is modeled after a child’s toy. Similarly inspired by a toy train set, Tunnel / Tunnel is a dark green twenty-six-foot long sculpture of a tunnel, with an interior cavity opened at either end. Schornstein / Chimney, a thirteen-foot tall sculpture of a red chimney, was cast from a model that was built to scale from bricks molded by hand in the artist’s studio. Like all of Fritsch’s work, these sculptures embrace familiar imagery to destabilizing ends. As Scott Rothkopf has written, “Fritsch performs a kind of material transubstantiation on so much quotidian stuff, affirming her mystical prerogative and heartily mocking it at the same time.”
Fritsch initially conceived of these sculptures as smaller multiples and models for large-scale works, and then at full size for this installation together with Vase / Vase (2006/2024) and Muschel / Shell (2026), which revisit recurring motifs in the artist’s work that first appeared in 2006 and 2004, respectively. The five sculptures are arranged in the gallery to loosely resemble a face when viewed from above, with Schornstein / Chimney and Vase / Vase delineating the eyes, and Muschel / Shell marking the mouth.
Photos and Text: Dave Pinter
Additional Text: Matthew Marks Gallery
