Schaulager has housed Katharina Fritsch’s monumental installation Rat King (1993) since the building opened in 2003. Sixteen gigantic, pitch-black rats sit motionless side by side on their hind legs in a closed circle. In the middle, the tails of the identical rats form a huge knot. They lean forward as if tense and menacing, but their tightly knotted tails seem to keep any aggressive impulse in check. The rats are prisoners and guards at once; the installation is as intriguing as it is disturbing.

Fritsch came up with the idea for Rat King when the Dia Art Foundation invited her to come to New York in 1989. She was so overwhelmed by the city of skyscrapers and canyons that, on seeing Dia’s exhibition spaces, she knew her work would have to relate to the location. She wanted to work with a figure that was elusive, a creature or animal of some kind but associated with human beings, somewhat like the gargoyles that lend Art Deco skyscrapers the feel of modern cathedrals.

The motif Fritsch decided to use is a phenomenon for which science has not yet found a definitive explanation. On occasion, young, nesting rats will tie their tails together, resulting in such an entangled knot that they can no longer unravel it. Reports of such rat kings date back to the Middle Ages, where they were thought to presage the plague. The petrified menace of Fritsch’s Rat King symbolizes the behemoth of New York, but the work was also fueled by German fairy tales and legends. In addition, Rat King might be interpreted as a metaphor for any number of unsolvable problems, be they personal, political, or social. To model the rats, the artist made a plaster model of a small stuffed animal and enlarged it to almost three meters in height. She spent painstaking hours working on the resulting plaster model until the anonymized rat appeared to be both archetype and prototype, the essence of “ratness.”