Katharina's mice and men

Nobody in Britain knows much about the German artist Katharina Fritsch, and nor - it transpires - are we supposed to. She spins an air of enigma around her life and work that is worthy of the ageing Garbo, spurning interviews and photographs for "superstitious" reasons. The upshot is that, despite being a 45-year-old, established artist who's exhibited all over the US and Europe, few people in Britain have had enough contact with her work to dispense judgment on it. Tate Modern is about to rectify this situation with a major show of 20 installations opening next week.

At a push, you could say Fritsch is famous for Rat King, a seething circle of 16 hunched black rats that tower over you, their tails conjoined in a hideous macram? bundle. It's a potent work and certainly made me shudder when I stood beneath it. But - sorry, folks - this isn't going to be on show at Tate Modern.

On the other hand, the Rat King does provide something of a guide to the rest of her work, which taps into the same reserve of Germanic folklore, bad dreams and fairy tales gone wrong. One work is a white-sheeted ghost standing next to a pool of reflective red blood; another involves a small white baby surrounded by 224 frolicking black poodles, while a third shows a bloke pinned down in bed by a big, black, beady-eyed mouse. It's no wonder the woman's got a superstitious bent.

So why doesn't she want to talk about her sculpture? One artist suggested to me that she was badly scarred by the press attention she received at the 1995 Venice Biennale, when Fritsch represented Germany. But she had by that point been exhibiting internationally for 10 years, including a rapturously received show at Krefeld featuring a larger than life-size elephant.

It seems that Fritsch maintains the fantasy that her pieces speak directly to the viewer. She is notoriously defensive about her work and is a total perfectionist, from her sharp black bob and chic attire (she's no bohemian beerswilling scruff) to the painstaking fabrication of her work. Details like folds of cloth, or the exact yellow of her Madonna multiple, take months to refine before being seamlessly cast in plaster.

Many of these painfully labourintensive casts involve Frank, Fritsch's long-suffering model and muse. He's the chap repeated 32 times in Company at Table, and is also the model for the Dealer, the Monk and the man who's squashed by the mouse.

Fritsch seems to be exacting revenge for an art history full of bullied female models (such as Lizzie Siddal who caught pneumonia after posing in the bath for Millais's Ophelia). Not only did Frank have to go the whole hog and get a tonsure in order to "be" the Monk, but he nearly died when being covered in plaster for the mould. As Fritsch explains: "Inside the layer of plaster Frank was turning blue and suddenly his head lolled forwards. I thought we should take the plaster off him, but the plaster technician didn't want to ruin the form. But I insisted and we barely saved Frank. From that day on we called the plaster technician the White Hangman."

All this emphasis on ye oldefashioned craftsmanship takes the focus away from the bigger question of what her work might stand for in the context of German art history. Fritsch trained at the D?sseldorf Kunstakademie - pretty much the only art school that matters in Germany - and has been an important inspiration for the next generation of artists making figurative sculpture, such as Thomas Schutte and Stephan Balkenhol. But their work is conspicuously different from Fritsch's obsession with folklore and fairy tale.

Her figures don't refer to any identifiable source, but seem to be a distillation of the stories she recalls as a child. So why are they so damned eerie?

On the other hand, she may well be obsessed with just childhood: Sophie von Hellermann, a young painter whose work Fritsch has been supporting (and which is on show at the Saatchi Collection next month), says that it's important to know about her collection of children's cuddly toys.