Kleine Pietà

KOENIGmuseum

Description

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Fritz Koenig (1924-2017) began to deal intensively with sacred themes, initially mostly commissioned for private use, later increasingly for church and communal institutions. His modern and innovative formal language had already made him known beyond the borders of Bavaria during his studies and led to the commission of two works for the Maria Regina Martyrum Memorial Church in Berlin/Plötzensee in 1962: Koenig designed a large gold-plated sculpture entitled The Apocalyptic Woman on the outside and a Pietà on the inside. The Small Pietà work shown here stands in close temporal as well as formal context to its large sculptural sister in Berlin, which had emerged as the winning design from a competition and is located in the memorial church's crypt. The depiction of the grieving Mother of God with her dead son on her lap, used as a devotional picture since the Middle Ages, is translated by Koenig into a modern formal language. The religious content of the image is emotionally charged by the creative implementation of the reciprocal penetration and crossing of the bodies.

Author

Stephanie Gilles M.A.

Rights Statement Description

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0