It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a ... giant blue rooster?!
The soon-to-reopen Minneapolis Sculpture Garden will be home to artist Katharina Fritsch's much anticipated new royal-blue-colored sculpture "Hahn/Cock," which will tower over viewers atop a white pedestal, reaching more than 20 feet in the air. This playful tongue-in-cheek critique of the "macho" nature of large-scale sculpture also works within the conceptual framework of Marcel Duchamp, who famously put a urinal in an art gallery and called it art, arguing that the context makes it art more than the art itself. The blue rooster also brings out a certain squeamishness in many people when they try to say the name of the sculpture.
But there is so much more to Fritsch than just that rooster/giant chicken, or however you feel most comfortable referring to it.
Enter "Multiples," a Fritsch exhibition opening Thursday evening at Walker Art Center. It contains more than 40 smaller-scale objects that the artist has painted in her signature monochrome style, creating a uniformness that strips the objects of their previous presumed meaning, replacing that with a sense of the uncanny. The interior exhibition offers a smart counterpoint to the hulking rooster that will be positioned outdoors. One element that really stands out is Fritsch's use of single colors, which continually mystifies viewers.
"She is not very forthcoming about the colors that she chooses," said Walker curatorial assistant Victoria Sung, who oversaw the show with visual arts curator Pavel Pyś. "She says the color or the image come at once. It's intuitive."
The exhibition isn't ordered thematically, but one can grasp at recurring themes. In one section, visitors will notice the beginning of the artist's engagement with the multiple. While still in art school, Fritsch created "Schwarz-weisses Auto (Black and White Car)" (1979), in which she took a toy car and toy caravan, and painted over them in singular colors.
"You get a sense that she is interested in notions of commercialism, display and circulation of these everyday objects," says Sung.
The uniform use of color makes it immediately clear what the object is and its function in the world (if it were functional). Its directness grabs a viewer's attention much like an advertisement, which is purposeful in that Fritsch is also playing with the language of advertising. One of her early pieces on view, in fact, is an advertisement created for a friend's publication. The ad never ran; instead, Fritsch made it a multiple in and of itself.
