“AT 5, IT WAS clear to me that I would be an artist,” Fritsch tells me over lunch at an Italian place in Oberkassel, a bourgeois neighborhood on the other side of the Rhine where the experimental artist Joseph Beuys lived before his death in 1986. Fritsch’s maternal grandfather was a salesperson for Faber‑Castell, and his garage was filled, tantalizingly, with art supplies. “It was a paradise,” she recalls. “I was always fascinated by the pencils with all the colors.” Growing up in Langenberg in the 1950s and in Münster in the ’60s, both near working-class Essen, in the heart of the Ruhr valley, Germany’s heavy industry heartland, art wasn’t an obvious career path. “Maybe my parents were secretly afraid of my never making any money, but they really encouraged me to do that, to paint and to draw,” she says. “My childhood was very sensual. It was a very artistic atmosphere.” And a little gothic: Fritsch kept her religious maternal grandmother company on her many tours of German churches, including the famous 13th-century crypts at Bamberg cathedral. “It’s very impressive when you go as a child into the Catholic churches and you see these figures, and there’s something that’s very cruel about what you see, and I was completely attracted by that,” she says. “Bodies dangling from crosses and skeletons in glass tombs?” I ask. “Yes,” she laughs. “You have nightmares, but it’s so impressive, so strong.” At the same time, American culture, its music and tacky consumer products, was conquering West Germany. “I was a big fan of Mickey Mouse and Barbie,” she says. “Some parents would never allow their children to have that, but my parents or my grandparents, they were not so afraid of things like that. We — my friends and I — all wanted to be more American.” After her application to the Münster Academy of Art was rejected, she instead studied history and art history at the University of Münster. “Art history was terrible for me. It was dusty and lifeless. Art should be alive,” she says. The people at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the famous art school whose students had included Beuys, as well as Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, “seemed to be much cooler,” she adds.

One night in 1978, Fritsch went to Düsseldorf to see a performance by Beuys and the video art pioneer Nam June Paik, who, like Beuys, was teaching at the Kunstakademie at the time. The occasion was a memorial tribute to George Maciunas, a leading figure of Fluxus, the multidisciplinary art movement that fostered experimentation — initially in the form of radical performance — while also stressing the value of art’s role in everyday life. “It was something,” she recalls. “We went there in a little car with six people and the area around the Kunstakademie was pretty crowded. It was this new wave and punk thing that was going on there.” Carmen Knoebel, who was married to the artist Imi Knoebel, ran Stone im Ratinger Hof, a music venue that, much like New York’s Mudd Club of the same era, attracted the art crowd; there, the likes of Sigmar Polke and Beuys listened to Krautrock bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk. Fritsch applied to the city’s Kunstakademie, Germany’s best art school, and got in.

Thanks in part to Beuys’s legacy, Düsseldorf in the ’60s and ’70s represented a place of radical liberation, becoming an essential force in contemporary art. (Beuys was dismissed from teaching in 1972 after he admitted 50 students to his class who had been rejected by the academy.) His influence lived on at the school in its notable painters, like Kiefer and Richter, but also touched Fritsch’s generation of students, among them the photographers Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff, the latter a good friend and frequent collaborator of Fritsch’s. Beuys believed that everyone not only could be but already was an artist. But this everything-goes attitude was as much about the tumult of postwar West Germany as it was a reflection of Beuys’s own philosophy. This was a generation of artists born into a chastened, broken Germany in the aftermath of World War II, yet who came of age during the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, in which the industrial Ruhr area played a central role. The country’s re-emergence as a modern industrial superpower with an uneasy relationship to its recent past defines the art of this period, which didn’t so much address this identity crisis as simply embody it, resulting in one of the most thrillingly innovative periods in contemporary art. As Beuys, whose most famous work includes planting 7,000 oak trees around the industrial West German city of Kassel in 1982, once wrote: “Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline [sic].” All German artists of Fritsch’s generation, in one form or another, have long been preoccupied with the question of what art should be and who gets to decide, and their work reflects profound ambivalence about the human-made world and consumer culture.

‘I think everything can be a sculpture for me. From the beginning, I wanted to create a kind of middle world, a world that really surprises people like they haven’t seen the object before.’

In straddling a line between the symbolic and literal, living things and objects, Fritsch’s art is itself an ambivalent comment about the elevation of the everyday to a higher realm and the fruitless search for identity and truth in a rapidly changing world. But her very particular aesthetic has always felt larger in scope than the postwar milieu that fostered her, and her work seems to suggest references of all kinds, from René Magritte to Kazimir Malevich — and, of course, a certain essentially punk desire to provoke. When she first entered the Kunstakademie in the late 1970s, painting still dominated, and Fritsch found freedom in the sculpture department, as well as a mentor in the artist Fritz Schwegler (who had been a colleague of Beuys’s) and many friends whom she credits as inspiration, including the Minsk, Belarus-born sculptor Alexej Koschkarow, with whom she’s exhibited work on several occasions. She attributes her initial interest in multiples and industrial processes to her grandfather back in Langenberg, not Andy Warhol. At first, she experimented with ready-mades, spray-painting flowers and toy cars with automobile paint. It was in 1987 that she made her breakthrough work, the life-size cadmium yellow Madonna, which became one of her first public works when the Catholic city of Münster installed it in a town square that year (the sculpture subsequently had its nose broken and body graffitied a few times). “When I first painted the Madonna yellow, it was really something,” she says. “Now everyone is doing things like that, but at the time, it was really a kind of invention.” Fritsch, who recently retired as a professor of sculpture at the academy, where she taught for nine years, laments the loss of that kind of low-stakes improvisation and openness to new ideas, new forms and new names. The Germany she lives in now more or less stands alone as the leader of a fraying democratic Europe, which only enhances some of the mysterious drama of Fritsch’s sculptures. What does a Christian symbol mean at a time when much of the developed world is turning away refugees and imprisoning asylum seekers? What is a fairy tale if not a desperate search for home? Fritsch’s art raises these questions but refuses to answer them. In the same way that her work defies interpretation, the artist herself doesn’t read too much into her formative years, which she sums up as lean and filled with exhilarating, if toxic and rash-inducing, material experiments. “Back then, everybody lived in very bad circumstances and the market wasn’t so strong,” she says. “We didn’t care so much; nobody had any money. It was an innocent time. We were innocent creatures.”

DEPENDING ON ONE’S mood, the odd sense of dislocation that Fritsch’s work evokes might strike you as irreverent, cleverly transgressive or something more insidious. But the longer I’m in its presence, the more I sense a kind of moral intelligence in her objects, which distance us from our well-worn perceptions and feelings. Then there’s the implicit feminism in a female sculptor looking at men — still, oddly, something of a rarity in contemporary art. Fritsch’s men — which have included, over the years, a monk, a doctor and a be-toqued chef — call to mind, respectively, Caspar David Friedrich, Faust and an employee of a Bavarian beer hall. They are not in any way erotic. She uses friends as models, men with a certain kind of vanity, she says; the newest work she’s preparing for the upcoming show includes two male figures holding mobile phones. The models were the art historian Robert Fleck and the artist Matthias Lahme, and the piece is a reflection of Fritsch’s increasing concern about the disconnections and false promises of a digital age — our total absorption into unreal realms and the particular seductiveness of this form of consumption. We peruse the internet for things that we probably shouldn’t: homes, partners, employment, an unnamed and impossible fulfillment. The oblivious blue men clutching their phones are unsettling not because they look so different from us but because they are exactly the people who surround us, who perhaps are us.

“I must say that this generation of mine, we were the power women of the 1980s, and we wanted to be strong and straightforward. But then the generation afterward wanted to be feminine, to look nice and to have children, and they also wanted to have a big career. It’s such a pressure,” she says, referring to the ongoing debate about gender roles in Germany, where women occupy powerful positions in politics but are far less prominent in art and business. While Fritsch is single and has neither children nor poodles — she spends much of her days happily occupied with running her large studio — she’s surrounded by a circle of artist friends and is very close with her mother and sister. Sculpture, in particular at this kind of scale, demands very hard physical labor, and casting her molds also involves contracting with industrial workshops staffed exclusively by men: “You get more and more conscious of that, how they treat you and how they often don’t listen to you.” The fabricators, she explains, will often speak to her male assistants instead of to her. “And then I say, ‘Look, please, at me and talk to me. I’m giving the order, I’m paying you.’ Only then, you are in the stupid position — then you are the old bitch.”