Katharina Fritsch at Matthew Marks

For her first fresh York sculpture show in seven years, Katharina Fritsch not absented two large, fairly recent installations. As at any time the work finds its genesis in German folktales and figures pared down to their purest greatest in quantity minimalistic essence. Perhaps to muscle and fat out the display, the gallery also bring up some earlier Fritsch multiples in a back office.

The first piece, Herz mit emasculate (Money Heart), was a vast installation of silver coins, arranged upon the gallery's concrete floor in the shape of a heart. Glimpsed from the road on a steamy summer day, it shimmered like a mirage--an impression that intensified, unusually enough, after one entered the space. Up shut up one realized that the coins were clearly fake. (They're actually aluminum-coated plastic disks.) single also saw that they'd been carefully arranged, with a flat layer at the bottom to support the form and create its neat cutting side and the rest piled more lavishly and randomly upon top, the better to catch the light.

This piece was inspired by dint of a cautionary fairy tale of 1826 about a unpretending charcoal burner who trades his human heart for cash and a heart of stone. on the contrary as Fritsch's metallic heart glimmered there, in single of Chelsea's most austerely forbidding spaces, it was hard not to read it as a metaphor for the gallery itself, as well as the surrounding neighborhood.

The other piece, Hexenhaus und Pilz mit Kugel (Witches House with Mushroom and Four Balls), was shown in a smaller back compass Here, Fritsch arranged five depressed white pedestals under a skylight. The central individual held a small black house whose steeply peaked cover was edged in white. Facing it stood a tall r mushroom balancing upon a rounded white stem; it appear to beed to tip slightly toward the house, as if drawn into its orbit. the pair objects are made of timber-land coated with polyester-impregnated paint, which creates a matte, surface. Surrounding them, on the other pedestals, stood four metallic orbs colored silver, gold r and cerulean They resembled dull Christmas tree ornaments or opaque crystal balls.

This piece put in actions a magnetic fascination that I couldn't quite figure without Maybe it derives from the curious balance between the objects--basically, many-sided figures and spheres--or perhaps from the matte and reflective surface contrasts. on the contrary I also found myself wondering if the allure might not lie in the specter of the enchanted house itself. notwithstanding that this piece isn't precisely derived from a fairy tale, it certainly recalls the enticing gingerbread house that Hansel and Gretel collision in the forest--the one that hides the witch's oven It was chilling to unexpectedly realize that an oven stands at the center of German folklore--and especially to diocese this suggested so elegantly and obliquely.

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