Urs Fischer

Vienna

Urs Fischer’s multimedia art, which is deeply rooted in sculpture despite the artist’s training as a photographer, unfolds grand gestures with a pop attitude. Born in Switzerland in 1973 and living and working in New York, the artist grapples with scale in a sculptural balancing act. Whether playing with light and shadow, gravity, or materiality, Fischer’s subtle and striking artworks engage in radical spatial interventions that situate his work in the aesthetic tradition of artists like Francis Picabia, Dieter Roth, and Gordon Matta-Clark. His equally abstract, representational, and figurative art probes formal solutions and challenges static art representations by depicting (mechanical) processes in various installations.

Searching for each work’s own internal dynamics, the artist cultivates apparent failure and makes chance an integral part of his production. As exemplified by his wax sculptures, whose candlelike forms evolve and disintegrate over the course of the exhibition, Fischer endows unconventional materials such as styrofoam, mirror glass, and glue with temporality, while the vanitas motifs in his still-lifes and skeletons memorialize the transience of the world.

Kunsthalle Wien

February 17th – May 28th, 2012
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Vienna
Austria

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