Katharina Fritsch
Tate Modern
To begin, a niggly question: When painting or sculpture is labeled “uncanny,” what is actually being claimed? Katharina Fritsch’s image world—of effigies and doubles, skulls and spooks, votive figures and völkisch motifs—has fixed her work in this explanatory frame; the term “uncanny” is often used to describe her art, and words like “unsettling,” “dark,” and “threatening” abound in the literature accompanying her Tate retrospective. Freud’s 1919 paper is fairly precise about the defining effects of uncanny narratives and occurrences: Loosening rationality’s grip, they permit repressed mental