Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956) lives and works in Düsseldorf. She represented Germany at the 1995 Venice Biennale and has had exhibitions in museums across Europe and the United States.
First unveiled in 2013, Hahn is a 4.72 meter tall sculptural portrait of a domestic cockerel made with polyester resin and stainless steel. Modeled after a taxidermy rooster, replicated on a monumental scale, the sculpture has been saturated in an ultramarine-blue hue.
Fritsch’s sculptures often begin with an archetypal image, which she subverts with shifts in scale and color. Life-size figures, everyday objects, body parts, and animals such as the blue cockerel present an immaterial quality often found in Fritsch’s work.
The rooster can be viewed as a symbol of pride, power, or prowess. Fritsch plays with allegory to reflect human character in animals, stating that “people can see themselves, their character, in animals”. Blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the deeply symbolic, Hahn provides an unexpected take on the idea of a traditional public monument.
