Urs Fischer: Wave
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
Gagosian Paris is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculpture by Urs Fischer.
Fischer’s uncanny ability to envisage and produce objects on the brink of falling apart or undergoing psychic transformation has resulted in sculptures in a bewildering variety of materials, including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. Continuously searching for new sculptural problems to which he can provide solutions (or other problems), he has built houses out of bread; enlivened empty space with mechanistic jokes; deconstructed objects and then replicated them; and transferred others from three dimensions to two and back again via photographic processes. Compacting the real with the mimetic, the thing with the view, he combines daring formal adventures in space, scale, and material with a mordant sense of humor.
In recent times, Fischer has been exploring the genres of classical art history (still life, portraiture, the nude, landscape) at the intersection with everyday life—in cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, and mutating or kinetic objects—to create an alternate reality that is as sculptural as it is artificial. The German term schmutz means “dirt.” In Swiss German, Fischer’s native tongue, it also means “kiss.” Doubling the term creates a lewd image and an apt analogy for an exhibition that approaches the enduring “problems” of sculpture with an almost adolescent sense of erotic humor whose flipside is pure melancholy.
Firstly, Fischer works with the transformative potential of the cut, to diverse effect. A spindly penny farthing bicycle, slightly enlarged from life, has been sliced in two and splayed open, each half painted in an opposing pastel tone and balancing miraculously on its edge; a water bottle lying on its side, seems casually discarded were it not for the neat, perpendicular break at the neck, which also delineates the color shift from “ripe” to “unripe” tones of incongruous yellow.
A grouping of nails, cast in bronze with a dimly reflective surface and measuring the height of an average man, leans against the wall. Their long shadows, also cast in bronze but disguised in a delicate coat of mauve paint, run down the wall and across the floor, giving material form to an atmospheric phenomenon. Thirdly, Fischer employs real fruit as the medium for quasi-scientific postulations on time, scale, and infinity: an apple and a pear hang together in front of a spotlight, demonstrating an eclipse, while a larger taxonomy of organic matter, graded from largest (pineapple) to smallest (grape) and individually strung up to form an even line in mid-air, alludes to a larger planetary system. The fact of the fruit’s perishability further compounds the complexity of these light-handed yet profound sculptural meditations on mysteries that are as vast as they are imponderable.
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.
Urs Fischer sits down with his friend the author and artist Eric Sanders to address the perfect viewer, the effects of marketing, and the limits of human understanding.
The exhibition Urs Fischer: Lovers at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, brings together works from international public and private collections as well as from the artist’s own archive, alongside new pieces made especially for the exhibition. To mark this momentous twenty-year survey, the artist sits down with the exhibition’s curator, Francesco Bonami, to discuss the installation.
On the eve of Awol Erizku’s exhibition in New York, he and Urs Fischer discuss what it means to be an image maker, the beauty of blurring genres, the fetishization of authorship, and their shared love for Los Angeles.
William Middleton traces the development of the new institution, examining the collaboration between the collector François Pinault and the architect Tadao Ando in revitalizing the historic space. Middleton also speaks with artists Tatiana Trouvé and Albert Oehlen about Pinault’s passion as a collector, and with the Bouroullec brothers, who created design features for the interiors and exteriors of the museum.
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Catalyzed by the exhibition Crushed, Cast, Constructed: Sculpture by John Chamberlain, Urs Fischer, and Charles Ray, Alice Godwin examines the legacy and development of a Surrealist ethos in selected works from three contemporary sculptors.
In his introduction to the catalogue for Urs Fischer’s exhibition The Lyrical and the Prosaic, at the Aïshti Foundation in Beirut, curator Massimiliano Gioni traces the material and conceptual tensions that reverberate throughout the artist’s paintings, sculptures, installations, and interventions.
Fruit and vegetables are a recurring motif in Urs Fischer’s visual vocabulary, introducing the dimension of time while elaborating on the art historical tradition of the vanitas. Here, curator Francesco Bonami traces this thread through the artist’s sculptures and paintings of the past two decades.
Urs Fischer talks about reading during the pandemic lockdown, sharing five books—both fiction and nonfiction—that he has turned to while in self-isolation.
Journalist and curator Judith Benhamou-Huet leads a tour of the exhibition Urs Fischer: Leo at Gagosian, Paris.
Urs Fischer and choreographer Madeline Hollander speak with novelist Natasha Stagg about the ways in which choreographic experimentation and an interest in our ability to project emotion onto objects led to the one-of-a-kind project PLAY.
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
The Winter 2018 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available. Our cover this issue comes from High Times, a new body of work by Richard Prince.
PLAY, currently on view at Gagosian on West 21st Street in New York, is a work by Urs Fischer in which nine office chairs move through the gallery and interact with visitors. Artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander worked with Fischer and a team of programmers and animators to create various gestures, movements, and behavior sequences for the chairs. Gagosian’s Angela Brown sat down to talk with Hollander about this process.
Urs Fischer and Francesco Bonami sat down with the Gagosian Quarterly to discuss Sōtatsu, a new painting in nine parts.
In midtown Manhattan, a new sculpture by Urs Fischer, entitled Things, was debuted in May 2018. Fischer and international curator, Francesco Bonami, discuss this unique exhibition with the Gagosian Quarterly.
Derek Blasberg speaks with Diane Brown, president and founder of RxART, and with contributing artists Dan Colen, Urs Fischer, and Jeff Koons about the transformative power of visual art.
For Printed Matter’s 2015 LA Art Book Fair, artist Urs Fischer and chef Mina Stone hosted an installation of a kitchen within Gagosian’s booth. Here is a recap of the fair.