Katharina Fritsch, Foto Vorsehungkloster (Photo Providence Monastery), 2008, oil-based ink and acrylic on silk-screened plastic panel, 9' 2 1/4" x 13' 1 1/2".

Katharina Fritsch

DEICHTORHALLEN HAMBURG
HAMBURG
Through February 7 2010
Curated by Bice Curiger

IMAGINE SOL LEWITT OR DONALD JUDD in love with old fairy tales, haunted not only by the formal archetypes of geometry but also by the iconography of piety, commerce, and everyday life in their most generic aspects. The resulting combination—as improbable, or as beautiful, as the encounter, so dear to Lautréamont, of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table—might have resembled the work of Katharina Fritsch (born in 1956 in Essen, Germany). Driven by a search for maximum visual impact, and fabricated with an obsessive perfectionism, her various productions—small or large, two- or three-dimensional—must surely count among the most memorable of the past three decades, over the course of which they have been launched into the world in measured doses.

“Many of my sculptures first exist as an immaterial picture that suddenly emerges in my mind’s eye. It’s like a vision, a picture that just appears. I think in pictures,” Fritsch declared in a 2001 interview with curator Susanne Bieber. The artist’s mimetic objects correspond to this conception (Platonic, some would say) of the image as a virtual and sudden totality. Whoever finds herself confronted with Rattenkönig (Rat-King), 1991–93, which may be Fritsch’s masterpiece—or, to take two examples of works included in this exhibition, Elefant, 1987, a green, life-size model of an elephant, or Tischgesellschaft (Company at Table), 1988, thirty-two anonymous-looking male figures seated at a long table in a scene that always reminds me of the men hiding in the forest in the Grimm fairy tale “The Twelve Brothers”—can attest to the durable impression Fritsch’s apparitions make on their spectators. One might describe her endeavor as the pursuit of “simple forms,” to borrow the title of a 1930 study (Einfache Formen) by historian of art and literature André Jolles, who deploys the phrase in his analysis of discursive formations such as legends, proverbs, riddles, jokes, and—indeed—fairy tales. Fritsch offers a highly elaborate visual equivalent of these linguistic or literary forms, which in her work are ceaselessly reinvented, transformed, retransmitted.

A further aspect of her oeuvre is perhaps most evident in Museum, Modell 1:10 (Museum, 1:10 Model), 1995, presented in the German pavilion of that year’s Venice Biennale. In making this gigantic model of an octagonal building in the middle of a clearing in a forest of plastic trees, Fritsch was inspired by both Vierzehnheiligen, Balthasar Neumann’s famous Baroque church near Bamberg, Germany, and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field. If the full-scale construction of the project is lamentably still pending, the model nevertheless constitutes, as an emblem of a solitary utopia, one of the most successful and enigmatic manifestations of the idea of sculpture as place.

With some eighty works, including twenty new pieces, this retrospective offers an exceptional chance to take stock of Fritsch’s crucial contribution to contemporary art. The show includes several of the artist’s series of screenprinted enlargements of postcards, through which she has since 2001 been investigating the banality of the socially shared souvenir. In her reproductions of tourist attractions and commonplace scenes, such souvenirs emerge as empty receptacles that each of us invests with meaning corresponding to the measure of personal history they call up. Here again, the quest for a degree zero of the image that would liberate the capacity for imaginative projection in all of us—a paradoxical, even impossible kind of stereotype, one characterized by absolute singularity—marks Fritsch’s artistic path.

— Jean-Pierre Criqui

Jean Painlevé, De gaulle ou Pince de homard, 1929, black-and-white photograph, 24 3/4 x 19 5/6". © 2009 ADAGP, Paris.

The Subversion of Images

CENTRE POMPIDOU
PARIS
Through January 11 2010
Curated by Quentin Bajac and Clément Cheroux

This survey of Surrealist photography—the Pompidou’s first since Rosalind Krauss and Jean Livingston’s 1985 “L’amour fou/Explosante-fixe”—might as well have “In the Expanded Field” as its subtitle. In the forthcoming exhibition of nearly four hundred works made between 1920 and 1940, expect lesser-known found images, independent magazines, films, and games by some seventy-five artists, from Jacques-André Boiffard to detective novelist Léo Malet—as well as rarely exhibited photos by André Breton and Antonin Artaud—all flanked by the iconic prints of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer. Offering some relief from Surrealism’s nagging sexism, a few strong female Surrealists, including Eileen Agar and Dora Maar, promise to twist their male counterparts’ subordination of women as objects of desire.

— Gilda Williams

Gianni Colombo, After-Structures, 1966, metal, lamps, electromechanical animation.

Gianni Colombo

CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
TURIN
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marco Scotini

Gianni Colombo, a leading Kineticist and cofounder of Gruppo T, cut his teeth in mid-’50s Milan alongside Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni; his work soon invited the participation of the viewer in a radical, witty attempt at providing a complete sensory experience. This exhibition of nearly one hundred pieces, Colombo’s largest retrospective to date, features early paintings, ceramics, and tactile reliefs; important motor-driven wall pieces; and reconstructions of six disorienting “environments” created between 1964 and 1993, the year of his death at age fifty-six. The bilingual catalogue includes essays by Umberto Eco and Achille Bonita Oliva as well as previously unpublished interviews with such artists as Giovanni Anceschi, François Morellet, and Olafur Eliasson, who affirm the considerable relevance of Colombo’s work today.

— Giorgio Verzotti

John Cage preparing a piano, ca. 1950. Photo: Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

John Cage and Experimental Art

MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA
BARCELONA
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Julia Robinson

For John Cage, immanence was bliss. His work and worldview perennially straddled radical materialism and romantic yen. Letting sounds be sounds, allowing chance to rule, Cage’s anarchic leveling of materials and events redefined the work, the score, the act. This large-scale survey at MACBA, produced with Henie Onstad Art Centre, promises to unveil the full and often paradoxical swath of Cage’s practice with more than two hundred recordings, scores, and objects—from his early prepared-piano compositions, to works that emphasize his pedagogical impact at Black Mountain and the New School, to performance-based and collaborative engagements with technological systems (including the mesmerizing HPSCHD, 1967–69). Catalogue essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Robinson, and others will further expound Cage’s ardent dedication to not composing.

— Michelle Kuo

Katja Eydel, Model ve Sembol Die Erfindung der Türkei (The Invention of Turkey) (detail), 2005/2006, photo installation, wallpaper with a series of 42 color photographs, each 16 x 13".

Modernologies

MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA
BARCELONA
Through January 17 2010
Curated by Sabine Breitwieser

The dual condition of modernity—at once enlightenment project (secular democracy, social equality, and universal human rights) and catastrophe (totalitarianism, imperialism, exile, and world war)—provides a notoriously fraught heritage for our present. Assembling about one hundred works made over the past half century by thirty-one artists and collectives, from older generations (Gustav Metzger, Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark) to midcareer and emerging figures (Runa Islam, Paulina Olowska, Marine Hugonnier), curator Sabine Breitwieser (along with fellow catalogue essayists Cornelia Klinger and Walter Mignolo) hopes to reveal new ways of comprehending modernism’s parallel valences, its perceived failures and unfulfilled promises.

— T. J. Demos

Thomas Schütte, Melone 1:5, 1986, wood and paint, eleven parts. Installation view, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 1987. Photo: Tomasz Samek. © 2009 Thomas Schütte/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Thomas Schütte

MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
MADRID
Curated by Patrizia Dander and Thomas Weski

Using irony and subtle humor to challenge monumentality, Thomas Schütte’s work counters the “straightness” of modernity with gestures of stumbling and failing—a strategy that should prove key in taking on the bombastic architecture and difficult National Socialist past of Munich’s Haus der Kunst. Centered around an eighteen-foot-high Styrofoam and plaster “anti-monument”—here referencing Schütte’s “Mann im Matsch” (Man in Mud) series—this substantial survey brings together more than one hundred works made since the early 1980s, including sculptures, architectural models, watercolors, and ceramics. Curators Dander and Weski highlight Schütte’s reflections on “ambivalence, tension, and conflict” throughout this wide range of media, but the accompanying catalogue is dedicated solely to the artist’s newest watercolors.

— Dominikus Müller