Urs Fischer: Wave
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
“Horror vacui,” or “fear of empty spaces,” is a term often used to describe outsider art, where every square inch of surface is filled with details and data in a compulsive excess of activity—perhaps in fear of that blank space that might stare back. In opposing the void, every particle is given form. The group exhibition Horror vacui proposes Op art as a side effect of this embattled triage of hand, eye, and mind, where mark making is a means with which to fill space with optically rich results.
As an antidote to aesthetic gratification, Marcel Duchamp invented the Rotoreliefs in 1923. By satisfying the retina itself, they mesmerized the eye with gyrating spirals. The result was a hypnotic visual white noise as well as a false sense of depth or vortex. Duchamp enlisted his product in an inventors’ fair, sure that this would reveal its niche market demographic. Not a single Rotorelief sold.
A vacuum neutralized of the burdens of detail, the white cube has long been considered an unencumbered and timeless context for viewing art. Urs Fischer’s playful wallpaper imitates the appearance of raw sheetrock, an odd moment of past-life mimesis for the walls in a room that now communicates the sensation of an indeterminate space. The corners of rooms are where planes converge and space is rendered functionally useless and thus often ignored, yet Joel Morrison’s shiny stainless-steel corner piece converts this uselessness into a glaringly prominent strength, just as Rachel Whiteread uses the entire space itself as a sculptural material.
The hours spent applying and reapplying a totality of marks are evident in the dense graphite drawings of Nancy Rubins. Torn papers are rubbed vigorously with graphite so as to appear burnished like dull, dark metal. Made by scribbling onto the paper contained inside of his pocket with a pencil cramped in his hand, William Anastasi’s Pocket Drawings act as a diaristic account of this space within everyday attire as an active site of mark making. The late Roman Opalka spent a lifetime documenting time and space by painstakingly counting toward infinity. His works on paper entitled Cartes de Voyage demonstrate his conviction, done outside the studio out of necessity.
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
Harry Thorne reflects on Brian O’Doherty’s recording of Marcel Duchamp’s heart.
The Summer 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Richard Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957 on its cover.
Richard Wright and Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre, London, discuss Wright’s latest body of work, recent commissions, and new monograph, which provides a comprehensive overview of his practice between 2010 and 2020.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming monograph, Richard Wright pens a personal and philosophical text about painting.
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 Fall 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Jordan Wolfson’s House with Face (2017) on its cover.
The artists address their shared ardor for poetry, the surfaces of painting, and nature.
Y.Z. Kami and curator Steven Henry Madoff sit down in Kami’s studio to discuss the artist’s exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain. Entitled Y.Z. Kami: De forma silenciosa/In a Silent Way, the survey features portraits; images of buildings, both sacred and ordinary; a sculptural installation of loose bricks inscribed with texts; and recent dreamlike abstractions.
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.
The artists chat about Korine’s luminous new paintings based on teddy bears, touching upon the color yellow, the fresh smell of gas, and the relationship among presidents, golf, and little stuffed animals.
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.
The pair discuss Nancy Rubins’s unique approach to sculpture, in which industrial and found objects—such as television sets, airplane parts, and carousel animals—are transformed into engineered abstractions that are at once otherworldly and familiar.
Sara Softness reflects on a new series of sculptures by Nancy Rubins, Fluid Space (2019–21), “visual poems” that hint at the invisible and the unknown.
Derek Blasberg speaks with Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, the designers behind the New York fashion brand Proenza Schouler, about their influences and collaborations, from Mark Rothko to Harmony Korine.
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Jacquelynn Baas profiles Isabelle Waldberg, writing on the sculptor’s many friendships and the influence of her singular creations.
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.