Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Katharina Fritsch, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The exhibition includes five new large-scale sculptures.

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(1979/2026), Tunnel / Tunnel (1979/2025), and Schornstein / Chimney (1979/2026)—are based on models that Fritsch originally made in 1979 while still a student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf.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.

Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956) lives and works in Düsseldorf. She represented Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale and her work was included in the 2022 Venice Biennale, when she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Fritsch has had numerous one-person exhibitions at museums across Europe and the United States, including the Dia Center for the Arts in New York (1993), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998), Tate Modern in London (2001), K21 in Düsseldorf (2002), Kunsthaus Zürich (2009), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2012).

This show marks the thirtieth anniversary of the first Katharina Fritsch exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery in 1996.

Katharina Fritsch will be on view at 522 West 22nd Street from May 8 to June 27, 2026, Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

For additional information please call 212-243-0200 or email inquiries@matthewmarks.com.

Press Release

Artist Page