Artist Spotlight
Urs Fischer mines the potential of materials—from clay, steel, and paint to bread, dirt, and produce—to create works that disorient and bewilder. Through scale distortions, illusion, and the juxtaposition of common objects, his paintings, sculptures, photographs, and large-scale installations explore themes of perception and representation while maintaining a witty irreverence and mordant humor.
Created in response to the covid-19 pandemic, the Artist Spotlight series highlights individual artists, one week at a time, whose exhibitions have been affected by the health crisis. A single artwork by the artist is made available with pricing information for forty-eight hours only.
Artist Spotlight: Urs Fischer features a recent work by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: Chad Moore
Urs Fischer: Lives of Forms
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: Francesco Bonami on Urs Fischer
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.
Shortlist
Five Books: Urs Fischer
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.
Urs Fischer: Leo
Journalist and curator Judith Benhamou-Huet leads a tour of the exhibition Urs Fischer: Leo at Gagosian, Paris.
Urs Fischer: Sotatsu
Urs Fischer and Francesco Bonami sat down with the Gagosian Quarterly to discuss Sōtatsu, a new painting in nine parts.
Urs Fischer: Things
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.
Related Exhibitions
Related News
Public Installation
Urs Fischer
Wave
October 14–November 30, 2023
Place Vendôme, Paris
Gagosian is pleased to present Urs Fischer’s public sculpture Wave (2018). The work will be installed at Place Vendôme in Paris from October 14 as part of Paris+ par Art Basel.
Wave is the sixth sculpture in Fischer’s series Big Clays. Despite their imposing scale, these works always begin with a small piece or pieces of clay shaped in the artist’s hand. Fischer describes this process as “a sensual and repetitive gesture, like a bodily motion,” which he ends prior to conscious intervention. After making hundreds of such forms, he selects only one to be digitally scanned and carved at an enlarged scale. Unlike a cast form or a digital replica, the resulting work preserves the nuanced tactility of the original maquette, magnifying its details—down to the artist’s fingerprints—into a monument.
Urs Fischer, Wave, 2018 (detail) © Urs Fischer
Online Reading
Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney
Headz
The first volume of Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz is available for online reading from December 7 through January 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney. Housed in a screenprinted box, this eighteen-volume collection brings together the vibrant and varied drawings made during HEADZ NYC—a weekly gathering of food, music, and creativity hosted by Urs Fischer, Spencer Sweeney, and Brendan Dugan between October 2017 and July 2018 in New York’s Chinatown. Interspersed among the artworks are photos of the participants and the space of creative collaboration they activated.
Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz (New York: Kiito-San, 2019)
Launch
Urs Fischer / UF
Urs Fischer is releasing UF, a new line of clothing and accessories, during Miami Art Week in the city’s Design District. An extension of the artist’s practice, the unique pieces—including T-shirts, upcycled garments, and domestic objects—are based on some of Fischer’s most recent works, such as the CHAOS #1–#501 series of digital sculptures.
First available for purchase through pop-up presentations, UF will debut at 100 Years, a group exhibition that features work by Fischer, presented by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch at the Buick Building. Following Miami Art Week, the line will be available at Jeffrey Deitch on Grand Street in New York beginning December 8, 2022.
UF on display at 100 Years, Buick Building, Miami Design District. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano
Museum Exhibitions
Closed
Urs Fischer
Lovers
April 2–September 18, 2022
Museo Jumex, Mexico City
www.fundacionjumex.org
This twenty-year survey—the first major presentation of Urs Fischer’s work in Mexico—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. Together, they exhibit the wide-ranging creativity, humor, and depth of Fischer’s practice.
Urs Fischer, The Lovers #2, 2018, installation view, Museo Jumex, Mexico City © Urs Fischer
Closed
Urs Fischer in
Before—Between—Beyond: The Collection in Transition
May 15–August 7, 2022
Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland
www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch
Before—Between—Beyond stages a selection of the Aargauer Kunsthaus’s latest acquisitions alongside other key contemporary works. The exhibition describes new narrative arcs in three chapters, reflecting the past, questioning the present, and venturing a glimpse of the future—sometimes gleefully departing from chronological order in the process. Combining photography, sculpture, painting, video, printed graphics, and drawing with large-scale installations and site-specific works that were created especially for this show, the presentation offers glimpses into the holdings of this public collection of Swiss art. Work by Urs Fischer is included.
Installation view, Before—Between—Beyond: The Collection in Transition, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland, May 15–August 7, 2022. Artwork, front to back: © Urs Fischer, © Christian Philipp Müller. Photo: Philipp Hitz
Closed
Urs Fischer
May 22, 2021–January 29, 2022
Bourse de Commerce, Paris
www.pinaultcollection.com
Urs Fischer’s Untitled (2011) is being presented in the rotunda of the newly renovated Bourse de Commerce. Fischer has reconceived the sculpture to suit the scale of the space, whose Belle Epoque architecture has been redesigned by architect Tadao Ando. The work consists of a group of larger-than-life candles—replicas of Giambologna’s sixteenth-century Mannerist masterpiece The Rape of the Sabine Women; Fischer’s longtime friend, artist Rudolf Stingel; and an assortment of chairs—that are lit and melt down over the course of the exhibition.
Installation view, Urs Fischer, Bourse de Commerce, Paris, May 22, 2021–January 29, 2022. Artwork © Urs Fischer
Closed
The Greek Gift
June 22–October 31, 2021
DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece
deste.gr
Coordinated by Massimiliano Gioni, this exhibition brings together a series of new and existing works alongside found objects and impromptu responses from a variety of artists who have maintained decades-long relationships with Dakis Joannou and the DESTE Foundation. Part divertissement and part collaborative project, the exhibition borrows its title from a chess tactic—the “Greek gift sacrifice.” Installed in the small, cavernous spaces of the Slaughterhouse, the works sit side by side like toys in a dollhouse. Work by Ashley Bickerton, Urs Fischer, and Christopher Wool is included.
Ashley Bickerton, Ocean Chunk: Indian Ocean/Aegean Sea, 2021, installation view, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece © Ashley Bickerton. Photo: Paris Tavitian