"Artists have the job of concentrating experience, not just letting everything rush past, but summing things up contemplatively."--Katharina Fritsch Contemporary German artist Katharina Fritsch is known for producing multiples--serially produced objects that she creates in mostly unlimited editions. Concerned with exploring the nature of human perception and experience, Fritsch makes instantly recognizable objects strange by alterations of scale, color, or material, or by excessive repetition. Each multiple in this display case is based on a mass-produced object popular in Germany. The conical-shaped wall vase, for example, is based on those used to decorate graves in cemeteries, while the small cat is actually a shoe scraper. The Madonna is cast from a small plaster statuette found in a tourist shop in Lourdes, a French city to which pilgrims come in hopes of witnessing a miracle. And though many of her multiples have autobiographical significance, Fritsch also intends them to have a more general, collective meaning, both as symbols of popular culture and commodity and as agents in triggering our own memories.

At first glance, many of Katharina Fritsch's sculptures may not appear to be very different from objects sold at thrift stores and tourist shops. Like the commercial items they bring to mind, Fritsch produced these sculptures in large quantities. Such mass-produced, three-dimensional art objects are known as multiples, yet unlike their industrial counterparts, each and every one of Fritsch's sculptures is an original work of art. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that Fritsch has elevated these objects above their associated environments by her fastidious attention to form and color. The artist based this work on a Madonna sold near the cathedral in Lourdes, France, but it's pretty clear that you wouldn't find this fluorescent figurine for sale there. The brilliant yellow color and the figure's fixed, frontal pose work together to visually flatten the three-dimensionality of this work, removing it ever so slightly from the realm of traditional sculpture as well as its original context. As you examine the other sculptures it becomes clear that Fritsch takes inspiration from many different environments, yet in each instance she manages to create a strange tension between the familiar and the odd, life and art, mass-produced and unique art objects. Katharina Fritsch discusses the value of the Madonna figure in her work "First, the Madonna is just a plaster figure, not Mary herself. To that extent the plaster figure is just as much a thing as a vase is. Of course the plaster figure symbolizes something, even something unique. The uniqueness disappears in my work, but essentially it disappears long before, in every souvenir shop. And the strange thing now is that every individual plaster figure does retain a certain aura, even in quantity."