Sculptures

Katharina Fritsch
Madonnenfigur / Madonna, 1987
© Katharina Fritsch/BUS 2014

When Katharina Fritsch, Jeff Koons and Charles Ray started their sculpture work, minimalism and conceptualism was all the rage. They all started exploring something different, and the results are now presented at Moderna. In the exhibition Skulptur efter skulptur (Sculpture After Sculpture) you can see a range of works by the three artists from the late 1980s to the early 90s, where the artists were exploring consumerism and the ready-made.

The three artists – who for the first time are shown next to each other – also find common ground in the fact that they have fully or partly focused their artistic work on reinventing traditional sculpture as an art form, a quite unusual path to take in the early days of their careers.

Amongst the high points of the exhibit is Jeff Koon’s well-known Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), the portrait of the now-deceased King of Pop and his chimpanzee Bubbles in his lap. It’s sweet, but also eerie, sucking you into the strange world where the two of them live in symbiosis.

While Koons and Ray are both Americans, Fritsch is German and she had a big breakthrough last year when her work Hahn/Cock, as part of The Fourth Plinth Project was chosen for 18 months on the fourth and only plinth without a permanent statue at Trafalgar Square in London. Find out more at Moderna this fall!

Skulptur efter skulptur

Moderna Museet i Stockholm, on display until January 18.

Curator: Jack Bankowsky, assistant curator: Jo Widoff