AMOK AND PSYCHE

The work of Anita Frech contains an avant-garde poetics and surrealist sensitivity to the juxtaposition of realities, mysticism, and evolving transformations. Her oeuvre, in which the artist forms visual alliances with avant-garde filmmakers, performers, and fashion revolutionaries – including figures like John Waters, Abel Ferrara, Lana Turner, as well as Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Paul Gaultier – forms an unusual, rapidly shifting “Opera diffusa” – part dream landscape, part memoir, part elegy for what is lost and for time itself.

Anita Frech’s investigations focus on polymorphic identities, gestural states, and the female, autonomous identity within this metamorphic flux. Between Lynch and vice, amok and psyche, pop cultural references are always present in her performances, sketches, paintings, and photographic studies. To contextualize the prevailing atmosphere of the works – especially Frech’s performative photoseries – one finds clear reminiscences in film genres such as Film Noir and Mindfuck Movie. The artist employs characteristic elements such as the gloomy mood, chiaroscuro effect, and the important figure of the femme fatale. Moreover, many of her works possess a cyclical structure, generating déjà vu experiences in some instances. A journey through her visual worlds becomes a chronological trip, where rootless wandering and ultimately recognizing one’s own ambivalences, the search for the external uncanny, take precedence. Perhaps it is precisely because of this that a majority of Frech’s works are imbued with a palpable, nervous drama. It becomes apparent that a self-speaking persona, amidst a narrative yet to be deciphered – one’s own story – is attempting to orient itself. Woven into this enigmatic narrative style are recurring questions that the artist directs to the viewers, but more so to herself: who am I, what is my reality, and am I even alive, or already dead?

To explore this, Frech ventures into a body metamorphosis in the series “Animal M.” Her female body becomes a site of negotiation with the big cat, reflecting an imaginary escape into another world where the feminine is not tamed and thus uncontrollable. The artist appears to observe herself, as she forgets in the form of her alter ego whether she is the hunted or the hunter. Thus, masked and draped in a fur coat, she wanders through the thicket of a defunct club. In this non-place of raucous excesses and nocturnal dramas, the viewer is confronted with an encounter both erotic and threatening, with one’s own aggression and illusions, expressed for instance through the use of mirrors. Backyard aesthetics meet extravagant glitter, always teetering on the edge of the surreal abyss. This also applies to the series “Golden in Hollywood,” created in Los Angeles, where Anita Frech’s exit strategy – the confident, even triumphant walk into the open air – is unexpectedly flanked by a stray cat. Psychologically interpretable symbols often overlay each other in Frech’s work, albeit not always so tongue-in-cheek. The artist engages in various ways with invisible opponents and with her own internal conflicts. Anita Frech is always a master of open endings, and her entire body of work can be seen as a very realistic case study of a woman who has not yet come to terms with her fate.

Despite all the confusions and distractions, Frech adeptly addresses processes of self-becoming and separation in her works. Her works reiterate various idealized, devalued, or defensively held role constellations in interpersonal relationships. In accordance with Stephen Karpman’s psychological model of the “drama triangle,” which explains conflictual events through the alternating, predominantly unconscious adoption of three roles – persecutor, rescuer, and victim – the artist creates multiple narrative arcs that merge into powerful psychodramas in sketches, paintings, and performances. At this point, it can be argued that Anita Frech sees herself not only as an artist but as her own muse, connecting her with her surrealist predecessors. Through this distinct – and at times penetrating – first-person narrative form, an attempt is made to immerse oneself in the character. In contrast, Anita Frech’s graphic work stands apart. In quickly drawn sketches and ink drawings in black and white, as well as in her expressive paintings, the other is much more prominently taken up. Although also committed to the principle of false leads, Anita Frech does not demand too intensive an effort from the viewers in sense-making here. Affects are encountered not in a staging along symbols and parables but much more directly, more ruthlessly. Portraits of children and young women frozen in the isolation of the white background tell of neglect, abuse, and emotional abandonment. Witnessed are wide-open eyes, frozen in terror, with a gaze that has seen too much, longing to finally be seen. In between, mouths that want to take in good and expel bad, elsewhere screaming silently in agony. Into these barely tolerable tensions, Anita Frech sprinkles a gem in the form of a handbag. Its leather, perhaps a second skin to bury oneself in, is primarily filled with a call to discover the secrets of the maternal world. After all, “she is the one.” “Will you rise with me?” asks the artist, meanwhile plundering, dissecting the handbag, and stealing away with the treasure of her childhood. Yet what is taken remains something foreign, mere baggage, and the artist performs all sorts of contortions to shed it. The artistic work thus becomes a symbolization of an initiation, which, in the style of the classic hero’s journey, is always accompanied by trials. Demons lurking deep in the darkness are as present in Frech’s work as phantasms, will-o’-the-wisps, and seductive promises. And fate strikes brutally again. But this time, Anita Frech calls companions to her side, pairs of eyes that almost voyeuristically accompany her, bearing witness. She fills the cosmos of images with splendor and glamour, confidently dancing away from the battlefield until the next call beckons.

Esther Mlenek
Vienna, 2022