Urs Fischer: Wave
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
As an artist you compete with reality, and the order of reality is always more interesting than the order you can make. But, because you make the order, it becomes information.
—Urs Fischer
Gagosian is pleased to present new works by Urs Fischer. This is his first solo exhibition in Asia.
Fischer reinvests traditional art historical genres (still lifes, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and interiors) with an abundance of rich and surprising forms. In his cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, kinetic objects, and texts, he ceaselessly mines the intersection where art meets everyday life. He has built houses out of bread, enlivened empty space with mechanistic jokes, deconstructed objects and then replicated them, and transferred other objects from three dimensions to two and back again via photographic processes. His daring formal adventures in space, scale, and material also reveal a mordant sense of humor.
For the title of this exhibition, Fischer provides a musical staff, with a treble clef and several notes positioned along four—rather than the customary five—lines. The notation implies music, but with no apparent tune; it is a title, yet it is inexpressible. Such paradoxes course through Fischer’s oeuvre. In his Problem Paintings from 2011, he obstructed vintage publicity headshots with silkscreened images of ordinary objects such as a bolt or a banana. The current exhibition continues this perception-altering pursuit; it comprises eleven large-scale tableaux made up of found images, expressive gestures, and photographs of the artist’s personal spaces. But these pictures are neither paintings nor photographs, neither abstract nor representational. By digitally manipulating photographs of brushstrokes, Fischer forges gestural streaks by inserting and blurring images of television screens, faces, and more. The brushstrokes are silkscreened over “homescapes” and “studioscapes” (domestic and atelier views) that provide glimpses of works in progress, art materials, furniture, and artworks from Fischer’s own collection.
In Foamcore (2017), silkscreen test prints and works by Fischer and others are propped against a studio wall. Purple blots and smears of television static interrupt perspectival logic, making it difficult to tell whether the brushstrokes are on the surface of the painting or on the stacked works in the room. By destabilizing the pictorial conventions of foreground and background, Fischer also plays into a long art-historical tradition of paintings within paintings, from the nautical scenes and maps on the walls of Vermeer’s interiors and Velázquez’s grand enigma Las Meninas to Matisse’s pictographic Red Studio. Undermining the assumed conventions of painting and photography, Fischer’s cunningly generated visual strata act as unstable and irresoluble meditations on the act of looking.
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.