Kleines Pultepitaph für Zwei. 1983.
Iron cast mounted, with brown rust patina.
Clarenbach Sk 824. One of two copies. 28 x 40 x 28 cm (11 x 15,7 x 11 in).

PROVENANCE: Private collection Baden-Württemberg.

LITERATURE: Fritz Koenig. Skulptur und Zeichnung, exhibition cat. Neue Pinakothek, Munich/Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1988/89, cat.no. 53, p. 142 (ill.), the larger version of the same composition was exhibited.

With his Epitaphs, Fritz Koenig links up with a common late medieval funerary tradition, what are known as ‘gisants’, tombs featuring a recumbent figure of the dead on the cover, and, within this group, the ‘Transi’ in particular, representations of the corpse in a state of decay. Koenig recalls this latter subgroup even though he reduces the bodies of his recumbent figures to narrow, stereometrically formed fragments. Koenig is not really concerned with eliciting the horror that overcomes those looking at such funerary monuments. Instead, he renders in visual terms the quintessence, the animal physical aspect, even when the body is about to decay, and bodies sinking into the lap of earth, which is waiting to receive it. The brittle surface of the material, on the other hand, neutralises what is happening by elevating it to a different, idealised plane. All these works must be viewed in the context of the work for the memorial to the victims of the National Socialist regime in Mauthausen (see on this: J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Epitaphe. Liebe, Tod, Vergänglichkeit in Zeichnungen und Bildwerken von Fritz Koenig, in: Exhib. Cat. Fritz Koenig, Munich/Berlin 1988/89, p. 51f.). [DB]