SOME OTHER SPRING: Urs Fischer Part 1
By Horace Brockington
Urs Fischer was born in Zurich in 1973, and has since lived in Amsterdam, London and Los Angles. Presently, the artist lives between Berlin, Los Angeles, and Zurich. In a rather brief period he has emerged as an important and exciting young talent. Fischer briefly trained as a photographer at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich and experimented with film. He has studied at the de Ateliers, Amsterdam, and as lived as artist?in -residence at the Defina Studios, London.
Despite his early training in media Urs Fischer?s paintings and sculptural works have become the distinguishing force in his recent artistic output. His sculptures are often painted and on occasion made of wax. Fischer sculpture reflects a wonderful synthesis of energetic precision and improvisation. In these works Fischer will combine single objects, such as an oversized chair and a giant pack of cigarettes. However it is in the realm of installations that his sculptural works express the uniqueness of his sculptural vocabulary. Fischer?s paintings constructed out of numerous layers of wood, sheeting and pigments are quite weighty and are often mounted on the wall with hooks and angle irons to keep them from falling down as such that they become essentially sculptural. Fischer does not concern himself with the hierarchical of art as with the momentary aspects of his installations and sculptural configurations.
"To me, the most exciting thing is to shift hierarchies in simple situations so that the conventional perception of things suddenly doesn?t work anymore…in the end everything should just come together to make a picture"1
Urs Fischer embraces the rich potential of chance in his work. Fischer?s open approach to the construction of his works and insitu installations endow his art with a fresh receptiveness. Fischer has stated that faults often "elude conventional and banal perfections?it reflects the personality of the artists and his character, it is human, it is everything, it will redeem the work."2 However what initially appears spontaneous in Fischer?s art is misleading as the works are conceived and constructed with great care and craftsmanship. Christopher Becker has stated, "In the process they make a razor-sharp statement on the (quantitative) productivity of contemporary art. Fischer?s professionalism is based on self-confidence and self-reflection, on his ability to use art to make statement about the present, on astonishing technical repertoire and, above all on wealth of worthy ideas." 3
Fischer uses free play of associations evoked by the object and their titles to engage the viewer, letting the spectator into the certain emotional state of the work, but also allowing the viewer to invent their own stories. Urs Fischer wants his work to elicit a complex range of emotions, forms, and ideas without grounding the concepts into any definitives.
Urs Fischer has participated in numerous exhibitions varying from the Stedlijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam to the Venice Bienale in 2003. In the Netherlands his work was shown in the project "Morning Glory "(1998) at the de Ateliers, where Fischer built walls on a foundation of fresh fruit, when eventually aged and produced a foul odor. For a group exhibition at the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Fischer produced a wall of bricks erected on a foundation of fruit, lettuces, potatoes, onions, etc. The cemented wall corners and ends suggested a small room and surrounding architecture created the notion of a built ruin. As the fruit and vegetables rotted, the structure became increasingly in danger of collapsing, compounded with the smell of mold, and removed any notion of an idyllic romanticized ruin. Fischer has continued this notion of the fragility of architecture in a series of work including the 1999 "Glaskatzen ?Mulleimer der Hoffnunu" which consist of a irregularly broken panes of glass attacked with silicon to a wooden base in a manner that suggested a crooked landscape of ruins. A related work was produced by the artist in 2000 as part of the Manifesta Biennial in Ljubljana, the work entitled "The Membrane" consisted of glass mirrors, silicone, and projections
An installation created for the Delfina, done in collaboration with Amy Adler an artist who was in resident during Urs Fischer residency at the Delfina Studio Program was invited by Fischer to create a new piece " Girl Next Door" as an integral part of this installation. For the installation Fischer combined an ongoing series of drawings hanging from a tree-like structure in the center of the space. The drawings reflect Fischer?s graphic approach which often fuse traditional modes of drawing with graffiti and tattoo art based on themes of beauty and ugliness, humor and tragedy alluding to experiences of everyday life.
At the ICA in London Fischer exhibited sculptures and collages made of various materials such as candlewax, scrap wood, silicon, clay and PVC. Among these were Medardo Rosso-like busts with its mouth open placed on a table; a transparent kitten crouched on a wooden catwalk between two sheets of glass, and an assemblage that resembled a film set.
A solo exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "What Should an Owl Do with a Fork" included a wide range of Fischer sculptural elements. Entering the gallery, the viewer was first confronted with a white chair (Routine: Automatic Melancholy), which on closer examination was fabricated out of Styrofoam, each element nailed and glued together, its shadow painted on the floor. Many of his painted shadows are made with household paint on the floor rendered to precise scale. Other Fischer shadows are rendered using less orthodox materials, jams, etc. Urs Fischer?s preoccupation with shadows comes from essentially naturalistic realm. They mimic the manner in which the physical object (chair/sculpture) he creates would cast a "real " shadow. The artist wants to create the distinction between figure and ground, between perceived object and perceiving subject. One small deviant detail often reveals the shadow?s shift in status from the negative to the positive — it is painted white. Fischer?s shadows become far from empty signifiers they are laden with meaning then the objects that supposedly generate them. Fischer has noted: "The combination of object and shadows adds to the tension of the spatial situation as a whole because you can walk around the piece and see entirely different views of it. "4
At the center of the Santa Monica exhibition, Fischer has placed a life size dark pink candle molded in a female form which gradually melted away (What Should an Owl Do with a Fork). A painted plaster bowl holding a plaster pear assembled with real fresh strawberries (replaced daily by the museum ?s staff). In a corner (Good Luck/Bad Luck Bowl) set against two other metal "still lives" (Good Good Breath/Good Bad Breath) ?abstraction depictions of flowers. In another corner a stuffed dog stood propped up on a water bottle, its tail wagging like a metronome (Gypsy).
. Fischer has had recent solo exhibitions at Gavin Brown Enterprise, NYC, and Sadie Coles, HQ, London. Where for the exhibition "Need no chair when walking" Fischer produced three life-size, handmade, painted wax sculptures in the form of nude woman as life-size candles. The figures were rendered in a highly humorous manner with exaggerated features and delightful coloration (bright red nipples, honey ?hued locks). Despite their whimsical quality they actually allude to canonical sculpture- TheThree Graces, which have now been transformed to candles. Their wicks were lit at the exhibition ?s opening, and the figures gradually melted away over the course of the exhibition, disfiguring the recognizable body parts. The figures, which violently self-destruct during the exhibition offer a complex series of positions for the female, image in contemporary art, as well the entire art historical canon. Engaging on our understanding of the female nude in art, the sculpture subverts the genre?s traditionally associations. One of the figures has a raw gash that runs across the torso and the hands are mere clumps collectively suggest maimed bodies. However, Fischer is not aiming for a depiction of violence rather he is interested in a more abstract idea such as the visualization of time, construction and deconstruction.5 The actual wax act as a important signifier of this intent. It is a material that moves between complete malleability and the dissolution of form. As the wax burns down during the exhibition radically new shapes emerge entirely without the artist’s intervention. As such these works talk directly to concept of art as process. The creative process is not complete when the exhibitions open; it is not finished until the work has been entirely destroyed.6 Fischer has now pushed the open-ended notion of a work of art into an autonomy of the materials means.
Recent projects have included a selections of works installed at the Centre Pompidou Paris; the Athens exhibition, "Monument to Now" based on Dakis Joannou?s private collection, and a major installation and the most comprehensive exhibition of Fischer work to date at the Kunsthaus, Zurich? s Buhre -Saal entitled "Kir Royal". This latter exhibition represented the first time the 13000 square ?metre exhibition space has been given over to a solo exhibition by a young artist of Fischer generation. "Kir Royal" consists of a series of new sculptures created insitu, large-format paintings and drawings, including series of raindrops the size of duck eggs made of baby-blue painted acrylic resin on nylon threads suspended in the air, large pieces of cut of walls (Portrait of a Single Raindrop, 2003). Red skin-like bits of fabric are hanging from aluminum scaffolding and are illuminated by spotlights (Membrane, 2000), Around the exhibition space the sculpture Pink Lady, 2001 is sitting on a table. Chairs are suspended from the ceiling on thin threads and cast oversized aluminum shadows. In the middle of installation, a boulder suddenly appears pierced by a sword. The entire installation becomes a type of stage set latent with theatricality. Fischer collaborated with Curator Mirjam Varadinis in the architecture design of the space to compliment and critique the special condition of the space built in 1958.
Among his current projects is recently published "Good Smell Make Up Tree" a collaborative publication. The work consist of a series of illustrations by Fischer of his paintings, drawing, and sculptural works, installation views and studio shots arranged by Fischer, and a series of piano scored suite for strings and oboe by composer and improvisational performer Garrick Jones. Jones born in Indian Ocean and raised in Africa, Europe and the U.S. is represented by large-scale full-page reproductions of his scores.
