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20/4/2002

StartKapital and Katharina Fritsch

K21 Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf

Katharina Fritsch

21 April - 8 September 2002

Katharina Fritsch showing at the Ständehaus: this is like a birthday present to the new museum on the occasion of its opening. Her first retrospective in Germany constitutes the start-off of an institution which in the 21st century will continue the work of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The importance of Katharina Fritsch's contribution to contemporary art becomes evident when considering the fact that this exhibition was organised in cooperation with Tate Modern in London. After her one-man-shows in the mid-nineties in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basle, the work of the artist is now shown in a breadth and density without precedent. Katharina Fritsch made it her business to modify and to complete the show at the Ständehaus in such a way as to deal in a particular way with all spatial aspects of this new art space located in the city in which she lives.

The work of Katharina Fritsch sets in at the end of the seventies and marks exactly the time period with which the collection as well as the program of K21 starts. Today, the subjects occupying again an important place within contemporary art are amongst others the image, the story and the recollection. These are also essential aspects of Katharina Fritsch's work. As a European artist with an alert "American" eye to Minimal Art and Pop Art, she has had an important part in the reshaping of these artistic subjects during the last 20 years. Her outstanding sculptural work shows forceful images comprehensible for everyone, combined with great precision and spatial presence.

Her spatial works such as "Elefant", "Mann und Maus", "Kind mit Pudel", the various "Warengestelle" or her acoustic installations provoke a variety of visual and emotional reactions. Her themes are recognizable at first sight. The range of subjects goes from the domestic world to society and consumption up to metaphysics. Recollection and dream are as important as myths and other public images.

All works thereby show a multitude of meanings. The enormous black mouse on the sleeper's white bed for instance is the incarnation of a male-female's nightmare, though it is at the same time a great joke which frees by laughter the psychologically endlessly charged subject. These familiar pictures form the starting point of most of Katharina Fritsch's works, and she takes them seriously in a peculiar kind of way. In order to revive them as communication forms, she uncovers their trivial core and peals off the coating of their industrial use. By doing so, she makes the overseen, the too much seen but also the unlikely more probable.

Katharina Fritsch offers the viewer a seeming paradox: evident images of multiple contradictions. Images which give cerebral and emotional activity (which we call the seeing) the right they are entitled to: the right to tell the viewer to fully exhaust his sensuous cognitive faculties. The exhibition shows that this is possible also in the confusingness of the present time.


Image: Katharina Fritsch
Dealer (Händler), 2001
Polyester, colour
40 x 59 x 192 cm
K21 Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus,
Loan of Ackermans Collection
Copyright: Katharina Fritsch, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2002

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K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen im Ständehaus

Ständehausstr. 1
40217 Düsseldorf
Tel. 0049/(0)211/8381-600
Fax. 0049/(0)211/8381-601
Info@kunstsammlung.de
www.kunstsammlung.de

Opening hours:
Tuesday - Friday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Every first Wednesday in the month 10 a.m. - 10 p.m.
Closed on Monday.

1. STARTKAPITAL Opening presentation
Until 27 April 2003

K21 Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus is a museum for contemporary international art, for the art of the 21st century. Here, the successful work which the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen has carried out on behalf of modern art will be carried on into a new era. The museum's program starts in the 1980s, when due to the post-modern turn, the historical ideas of modernism and avant-garde relaxed and broadened. People started to rethink art and its history in a more critical kind of way. They gave the picture, the narration and the metaphor as well as the heterogeneity and the ambivalence a new meaning. At the same time, new forms of artistic expression were developed. These were photography and especially moving pictures such as film and video - new means through which artists declared the social space itself on medium of artistic activity.

The inauguration show will be called STARTKAPITAL (start-up capital), which means both, the specific situation of the young institution, as well as the art itself as a people's indispensable capital. The exhibits will constitute a panorama of collection items and exhibition rooms, part of which have only recently been acquired by the K20K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: room installations by Marcel Broodthaers, Nam June Paik and Imi Knoebel, a large ensemble of sculptures by Thomas Schütte as well as photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall.

During its initial phase, decisive support is given to K21 by a majority of long-term loans made by the Simone and Heinz Ackermans Collection. Specializing on figurative sculptures and installations created in the eighties, the collection includes works by Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Ilya Kabakov, Juan Munoz and Franz West. The exhibition will though also show video art by Bill Viola, Tony Oursler and Paul Pfeiffer, all recent acquisitions of the Ackermans Collection. Reinhard Mucha's monumental room installation "Das Deutschlandgerät" (1990) is one of the collection's main works and will occupy a central position within the museum in the former Plenary Chamber of the Ständehaus.

STARTKAPITAL is supported by two further private collections, which are exemplary for their coherent artistic content: long-term loans from Reiner Speck, Cologne, as well as from Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann, Herzogenrath, will be displayed.

The Speck Collection is literary determined and includes "museum pieces" such as works by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Jannis Kounellis, Lawrence Weiner, Rosemarie Trockel, Martin Kippenberger and Georg Herold. Special mention is to be given to Sigmar Polke's work which is of almost outstanding importance to the post-modern strategy of the ironic and speculative art.

On the other hand, the Schürmann Collection includes younger artists as well, who like to explore the ins and outs of the art's communication potential combining in their work various media. With Markus Popp's "Oval Process" (2000) for instance, the museum will exhibit an interactive sound box, giving evidence to the narrow bond between electronic music and young visual art. The main emphasis of the Schürmann Collection is on contemporary US art by Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Zoe Leonard, Jack Goldstein, Morgan Fisher, James Welling, Harmony Korine as well as the wide-ranging TV project by Mel Chin and GALA Committee concerning the cult series "Melrose Place".

For K 21, the former parliament building for the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the so-called Ständehaus, was converted. Designed in 1880 in a neo-renaissance style by the architect Julius Raschdorff, the building served for the convention of the provincial government. The building is representative of the 19th century and has been transformed into a functional and at the same time impressive museum with 5,300 m². Special attractions are the large public piazza in the courtyard, along with the spectacular glassed-in dome on the roof.


Opening hours:
Tuesday - Friday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Saturday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Every first Wednesday in the month 10 a.m. - 10 p.m.
Closed on Monday.


K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen im Ständehaus
Ständehausstr. 1
40217 Düsseldorf
Tel. 0049/(0)211/8381-600
Fax. 0049/(0)211/8381-601

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