Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer was born in 1973 in Zürich, in Switzerland; he lives and works in New York. Working with collage, drawing, sculpture, and most notably installation, Urs Fischer is known worldwide for large-scale sculptures and installations that explore a wide range of materials from popular culture, focusing on making objects borrowed from everyday life. “Everybody likes objects; everybody likes different objects”, he has said. “It comes down to what objects you want to put in your art.” One of Fischer’s interests is the spontaneous process of creation and decay of materials over time. A primary example is Untitled (2011), presented at the Venice Biennale the same year – an uncanny reproduction of Giambologna’s sculpture Rape of the Sabine Women made of wax and slowly melting over the exhibition space. Another recent trajectory of Fischer’s artistic research relates to the possibility of creating innovative objects and shapes in the virtual world. In 2022 he presented the digital sculptures CHAOS #1–#500 at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, featuring computer-generated objects that would orbit and intersect with one another. Whether utilizing ephemeral mediums such as soft wax and foodstuffs, or digitalized objects, at the core of Fischer’s practice remains the mining of the endless possibilities offered by materials and textures.