Urs Fischer

People seem to fear art. Art has always been a word for this thing that can’t be rationalized; when you see or hear something that you struggle to explain. But that’s its strength, of course, that’s what the word “art” is for. —Urs Fischer 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 and mordant humor. Born in 1973, Fischer began his artistic career studying photography at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. He later lived in London and Los Angeles, and shared a studio with Rudolf Stingel in both Berlin and New York. Themes of absence and presence, as well as the processes of art production, pervade his work, in which Fischer makes use of tables, chairs, shadows, and light to explore distortion and anthropomorphism. In Stuhl mit (1995–2001), bulbous, fabric-covered legs merge with a wooden chair, and in Studies for chairs for individual seating positions (1993), the absence of a human body is suggested by a sawdust and rubber mold draped over the furniture. Food is also a major element in Fischer’s work. Rotting, melting, and crumbling, and placed in juxtaposition with permanent materials like metal, bricks, and mortar, it serves as a memento mori. Rotten Foundation (1998) comprises a brick structure built on a foundation of spoiling produce; Untitled (Bread House) (2004–05), a Swiss chalet constructed from loaves of bread, was left to be eaten by parakeets; and in the Problem Paintings (2010–), portraits on aluminum panels are obscured by images of eggs, peppers, and kiwis, as well as twisted bolts and half-smoked cigarettes. In 2009 Fischer presented Marguerite de Ponty at the New Museum in New York—his first large-scale solo exhibition in an American museum, which featured a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments including mirrored labyrinths and uncannily wallpapered rooms. At the Venice Biennale in 2011, his wax copy of Giambologna’s late-sixteenth-century sculpture Rape of the Sabine Women slowly melted, looming over additional candles depicting an office chair and a man wearing glasses and a sport coat. The candle works, which Fischer has produced since 2001, attest to his mastery of entropy, as well as his simultaneous incorporation and rejection of tradition. Fischer had his first solo exhibition with Gagosian in 2012. The following year, for a survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, he invited 1,500 volunteers to make clay sculptures in the Geffen Contemporary during the weeks leading up to the opening, as part of the ongoing project YES (2011–). He has since exhibited with Gagosian on multiple occasions. For 2018’s PLAY , which featured choreography by Madeline Hollander, he transformed the gallery at 541 West 21st Street, New York, into an arena of chance encounters in which visitors interacted with office chairs that seemed to have lives of their own. In 2022, at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, he showed the digital sculptures CHAOS #1–#500 as a set of projected videos, each comprising a pair of virtual objects that orbit and intersect. Exploring movement, space, and simultaneity, the work took experts in 3D modeling, animation, and motion capture two years to complete. And in Denominator (2020–22), which was first exhibited at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street, New York, in 2022, he presented a 12-foot LED cube that displays fragments from television commercials in a shifting composition spanning the history of the medium. As soon as Fischer accomplishes one material feat, he embarks on another, in ways that are complicated and playful, messy and perfected.