Urs Fischer, Noisette, 2009. Mixed mediums, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.
URS FISCHER (Born 1973, Zurich, Switzerland/Lives and works New York City)
NEW MUSEUM
NEW YORK
OPENING OCTOBER 27, 2009
For his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, Urs Fischer has taken over all three of the New Museum’s gallery floors to create a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments. The exhibition “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty” is the culmination of four years of work. Neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective, the exhibition features new productions and iconic works combined to compose a series of gigantic still lifes and walk-in tableaux. Choreographed entirely by the artist, the exhibition is a descent into Fischer’s universe, revealing the world of an artist who has emerged as one of the most exceptional talents working today. An engineer of imaginary worlds, in the past Fischer has created sculptures in a rich variety of materials including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them. In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd. Urs Fischer uses a range of mediums to express the transience of art and, concomitantly, the human condition. Fischer has described his regard for the boredom that comes with everyday activities, and in his work the prominence of chairs and shadows — often fused together into one object — is an indication of the artist’s interest in equilibrium in time.
