Katharina Fitz: SHAPE–SHIFT
Beam, Nottingham
18 August–10 September 2022
Thursday–Saturday, 9am–5pm
Launch Party: Friday 19 August, 6–10pm
Free Entry, No Booking Required
Pizza from Small Food Bakery,
Foraged fruit beers from Cat Asylum & DJ
To coincide with the launch of the new book from Beam Editions When Seems Become Audible - Sculpture and photography 2013–2022 , Beam Nottingham will present a new solo exhibition by Katharina Fitz, the Austrian born Nottingham based artist. Fitz is best known for her sculpture and installation work using industrial materials such as plaster, clay, steel, plywood and latex. At the core of much of Fitz’s work is the exposure and the explicit presentation of the process embodied within the finished work itself.
The artist’s exposure of process within the work lies as a counterbalance to societies diminishing awareness of materials and processes as we are increasingly drawn away from the material world into the digital world. Globalised mass manufacture spread across a global supply chain has divorced us from how things are made and who makes them.
For Fitz’s first solo exhibition at Beam the artist will be presenting a range of work spanning the last decade which includes early photography work Chatarra (scrap) 2015. These photographs show collections of domestic scrap metal gathered by homeless citizens Bilbao which is then sold for recycling. These powerful photograph highlights the inequitable nature of western European society and how waste from a highly globalised supply chain becomes a currency for the socially excluded.
Two sculptures are also presented Catch and Release I & II (Plaster, wood, steel, rachet strap, castors, reclaimed polystyrene) 2021. These sculptures are an assemblage of the finished sculptures and the tools and devices used to create them. These turned forms are created through a highly physical process where the artist uses a custom made jig to shape and carve through a body of plaster. Alongside this work is a new wall mounted relief that comprised two clay fired slabs and a metal rod used to carve circular striations through the forms. Both works explicitly present the very process that created them emphasising Fitz’s desire to reconnect us to the process of making.
The final works on show are a series of new drawings that echo the sentiment of analytical and technical drawings that explore modelling and the construction of a ceiling joist. The drawings communicate the certainty expressed in elegant and functional proportions that can also be observed in the ceiling joists of the former Victorian class room, that hosts this exhibition.
Fitz's work simultaneously presents both the process and finished object, perfection is not pursued and in that sense the work stands as a counter balance to polished products from our globalised world. The work simultaneously embodies an energy that reminds of the need for human beings to connect and remain connected with the material world.
The existential threat of material illiteracy, a generation that cannot distinguish between natural and synthetic, machine made or handmade, virtual or real, is a generation that will be unable to change its environment. Without a dynamic understanding of materials and processes, we cannot make informed choices, about how we shape our environment. Fitz lifts the veil of perfection and presents us with the inner workings of process.
