Urs Fischer: Wave
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
May 29, 2020
In this series we invite artists and writers to tell us about works of art, literature, film, or music that have influenced their work or are at the forefront of their minds today. Here Urs Fischer talks about reading during the recent lockdown, sharing five books—both fiction and nonfiction—that he has turned to while in self-isolation.
Urs Fischer, Cioran Handrail, 2006 (front, detail), and A Place Called Novosibirsk, 2004 (back) © Urs Fischer. Photo: Stefan Altenburger
Urs Fischer, Cioran Handrail, 2006 (front, detail), and A Place Called Novosibirsk, 2004 (back) © Urs Fischer. Photo: Stefan Altenburger
I’ve been isolating with my family in Los Angeles. It’s great, but at times I envy people without children during the lockdown. I’ve been reading when I can, and I’ve realized that I turn to different books for different needs—sometimes to escape, and at other times it feels comforting to read something that illustrates one’s darkest moods. Turning to the past can provide solace and put time into perspective.
It’s difficult to grasp the unbelievably short timeframe in which humans have made a deep mark on this planet in relation to everything that occurred before we arrived. We are story driven. That makes us intelligent and absolutely incapable of understanding any broader context at the same time. If you think about it, we eat stuff that we would not even feed to our pets. The amount of stuff we consume or need on a daily basis is insane.
David Farrier, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
Ballard’s short stories, whose protagonists mostly struggle to embrace a violently changed world, were good company at the beginning of this new lockdown reality as I tried to make sense of what is taking place.
J.G. Ballard, The Terminal Beach (1964; New York: Penguin, 1974)
A very inviting journey into art, a viewer’s mind, and how each makes the other into more than the sum of its parts. Matar’s book, about his monthlong trip to Siena, where he immersed himself in paintings that had fascinated him since his late teens—and about how they are intertwined with his own life history—left me marveling about our love for art.
Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena (New York: Random House, 2019)
The Argentinian novelist’s short stories say the unsayable. The strong, visceral imagery is so powerful; each story resonates with me as if it were my own dreams. As a visual artist, I’m envious of the immaterial nature of good stories, the images that they create in one’s mind.
Samanta Schweblin, Mouthful of Birds, trans. Megan McDowell (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019)
The Romanian-French philosopher Emil Cioran makes for a good quarantine companion. I’ve been dipping into his collections of aphorisms for many years. His writings make my own agony feel like a happy place.
E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast, trans. Richard Howard (1952; New York: Arcade Publishing, 2019)
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 sculptures, paintings, photographs, and large-scale installations explore themes of perception and representation while maintaining a witty irreverence. Photo: RobertBanat.com
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.
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.