Infinitely Intriguing

Subversive, sure. Hypnotic, certainly. In an almost 30-year career, this German artist has taken her predilection for visual metaphors, culled from society's collective experience, and transformed them into arresting room-engulfing sculptures—installations, really. They'll be among 80 works when "Katharina Fritsch" opens at the Kunsthaus Zurich on June 3.

Her subjects span a wide range. Take the hollow column built from rings of yellow-painted plaster Virgin Mary statues or a 14-foot-tall cast-polyester elephant, her first large-scale sculpture, which looks authentic enough for the natural-history wing. Kunsthaus Zurich devotes half the show to her more recent silk-screens, dalliances with equally diverse subjects: a continental breakfast, a buff Speedo-clad sunbather. Rose petals and beefcake pinups are strewn across a bed in another piece. And a belle epoque lady, complete with pink parasol and fluffy dog, is frozen mid-stroll through a gallery where walls are plastered with blow-ups of Paris postcards.

Postcard (Paris) by Katharina Fritsch, copyright 2009 ProLitteris, Zurich.