Urs Fischer
LARGE, DARK & EMPTY
September 8 to November 17, 2007
Opening: Friday, September 7, 6 – 8 pm
Returning from its summer break, Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present a solo
exhibition by Swiss artist Urs Fischer. On view will be recent medium- and large-format
sculptures and a spacious installation work.
The artistic oeuvre of Urs Fischer (born in Zurich in 1973) reveals great wealth and
diversity, ranging from mixed media painting, drawing, and collage to graphics
(silkscreen, prints), sculpture, and installation. At this year’s Biennale in Venice, he
represents Switzerland at the church of San Stae, together with Ugo Rondinone. Urs
Fischer lives and works in New York.
Fischer’s sculptural work frequently deals with the questions of materiality, mass, the
classic form, and equilibrium. His pieces oscillate between extraordinary fragility and
subtlety on the one hand and highly massive, oversize objects on the other. In his threedimensional
works, we often find everyday objects that are familiar to us, such as
tables, chairs, doors, cupboards, washing machines, teddy bears, cigarette packets, or
rotting fruit. Urs Fischer lays emphasis on the ordinary, if not trivial things of our day-today
lives, processing them into something novel, something that is not seldom
spectacular. He modifies what is a priori given, using distortion, enlargement, or
recomposition. Fischer offers the viewer a new, often humorous look at the ‘things of
life’.
Another important factor in the work of Urs Fischer besides the material is time.
Depending on the materials and their functionalities, the works may change: Parts of
them may break off, some may be caught in perpetual motion, others may even start to
rot. The artist illustrates the transience of the matter, thereby reviving the traditional
Vanitas idea.
Once the visitor enters the gallery’s rooms, Urs Fischer will literally cut the ground from
under his feet. Two entire walls are equipped with floor-to-ceiling mirrors set in motion
by a hydraulic system. This makes the room appear distorted and fluctuating. The
exhibited works are reflected and refracted infinitely by the waving mirrors. It is an
overkill of presence, caused by the interaction of matter and immateriality, imagination
and fiction, reality and image. The viewer becomes part of the installation. Altering and
questioning conventional modes of perception by including the exhibition rooms into the
process of creation - the artist has already played with this principle in some of his
earlier works, where he has managed, with a keen sense of spatiality, to break through
established dimensions: Large passable holes are cut out of the separation walls, thus
creating new perspectives (“Urs Fischer - Kir Royal”, Kunsthaus Zurich, 2004); exhibition
rooms are covered with mirrors, thus appearing umpteen times bigger (“Urs Fischer –
Paris 1919”, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2006); or the entire floor is
colored black and pulled up over its edges in an irregular pattern with the aid of stencils
(“Urs Fischer – Mary Poppins”, Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of
Houston, 2006). In his past, Urs Fischer has already worked with mirrors, which serve
as a means to reorganize and choreograph our visual perception.
On view will be a new sculpture representing a vibrating table on which lies an open
book. Due to the vibration, it is almost impossible to decipher the displayed text. With
the focus and readability being disturbed, the contemplative moment of reading and the
functionality of the table can no longer be taken for granted. Here, the artist may also
refer to the absurdity of the Sisyphean task, an act that repeats itself endlessly without
leading to any result.
In other sculptures featured in the exhibition, Urs Fischer triggers an unusual dynamism
by combining subjects that would hardly ever be seen in such constellations. These
symbioses and interfaces give birth to new objects whose implied functionalities seem
to have become void and obsolete. The new form raises the question of its underlying
statement, while at the same time unveiling a fascinating and dramatic aesthetic. One of
these works unites subjects as different as a washing machine, a ladder, and a pillow;
another one brings together a washbasin, a skiing shoe, and a long branch. One
searches for the links and tangential points of such pairs of characteristics – organic
and inorganic, hard and soft, angular and circular –, and one finds them both in the
attentive and humorous eye that the artist casts on ‘things’ and in the dialog that he
creates between them, which relies upon his use of materials and the way he puts his
ideas into practice. Fischer’s approach is neither hierarchic nor judgmental.
For further information, please contact Anna Caruso at Galerie Eva Presenhuber.
