Urs Fischer

Paris

In recent times, Fischer has been exploring the genres of classical art history (still life, portraiture, the nude, landscape) at the intersection with everyday life–in cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, and mutating or kinetic objects–to create an alternate reality that is as sculptural as it is artificial. The German term “schmutz” means dirt. In Swiss German, Fischer’s native tongue, it also means kiss. Doubling the term creates a lewd image and an apt analogy for an exhibition that approaches the enduring ‘problems’ of sculpture with an almost adolescent sense of erotic humor whose flipside is pure melancholy.

Fischer’s uncanny ability to envisage and produce objects on the brink of falling apart or undergoing psychic transformation has resulted in sculptures in a bewildering variety of materials, including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. Continuously searching for new sculptural problems to which he can provide solutions (or other problems), he has built houses out of bread; enlivened empty space with mechanistic jokes; deconstructed objects and then replicated them; and transferred others from three dimensions to two and back again via photographic processes. Compacting the real with the mimetic, the thing with the view, he combines daring formal adventures in space, scale, and material with a mordant sense of humor.

Gagosian Gallery

April 5th – May 26th, 2012
4 Rue de Ponthieu
75008 Paris
France

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