IN FLUX

Kunsthalle FRO, Dornbirn, Austria
Latex, steel, cotton yarn, calico
2024

On Skin and Bones
Text by Sarah Tutt

Katharina Fitz is an artist concerned with process and transformation. It seems no coincidence, therefore, that Fitz’s solo show 'IN FLUX' provides us with another study of metamorphosis. However, this time the preoccupation is less with the weighted form and more with spatial mass and volume. Within In Flux, Fitz’s vocabulary augments away from the concerns of the corporal as seen in 'When Seams Become Audible' (2020) and 'Catch and Release' (2021), towards something far more skeletal and epidermal. As a result, this four-part installation considers the body in states where corporal insides are absent, and form is left with skin and bones.

In addition, the work sees a continuation of Fitz’s conversation with architectural space, here played out through the work’s composite elements in relation to the gallery in which they are sited. The raw, mottled colour and mixed organic textures of latex, mild steel, calico, hessian and cotton yarn contrast with the uniformly polished, hard surfaces and columns of the gallery. As the building gleams, so the work appears as if from another time. Yet the pillars that make the gallery distinct provide a key vernacular for the work that it encircles. Notions of the columnar tie space and work together.

In the centre of the gallery, a large, curved latex skin hangs just inches from the ground by heavy chains. It is as if a cylindrical form has been opened up to reveal the pleura that lines it. The sculpture almost breathes in its sail-like form, exhaling its latex smell from the massless interior. To the side, a tubular structure stands erect and grounded, providing an imagined cavity for the pleura next to it. By witnessing them together one can start to reference the transmogrification of volume that takes place across all sculptures. Metamorphic states are apparent between objects, inviting the playful transference of one form onto another in the viewer’s mind. The differing scales allow connections to be broad and various. And scale is key here. As we walk around, we must look up, peer down and see into at these large, empty curious bodies. On the floor, gravity pulls at the skin of a third body on its side, revealing a now familiar skeletal structure below. Opposite, a length of unsupported exuvial latex lies in a crumpled state.

Gravity has a strong voice in the room. It dialogues with mass to provoke feelings of both living and dying, of doing and undoing. It sucks on surface. It draws down the scattered thread ends from both skin and bones. Evidently made by human hand, the sculptures can be read as being repaired or stitched together. Like fading taxidermy specimens in a museum, they present us with a sample of something we recognise but have not been able to see up close.

Yet the proposition does not feel like an invitation to consider mortality, but notions of transience more broadly as what has been, what might be unfolding over time and what is yet to come. It hints at the title’s association with possibility.

In its dialogue with volume, In Flux calls us to be attentive to the constant, relational processes and changing states in the material world around us and therein we find a new reflection of ourselves.