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Urs Fischer
Urs Fischer provides an overview of the Swiss artist’s heterogeneous oeuvre and features many of his best-known works. Designed and conceived by Fischer, the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with clusters of works that allow the reader to observe how Fischer has explored disparate formal strategies to engage with his multifarious interests--which include gravity, architecture, shadows, representation, destruction, entropy and time--and revisit favorite motifs, such as furniture, fruit, animals, skeletons and other surrogates for his cardinal subject, the human body, over the past decade and a half. Produced for his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, this hefty volume includes essays by Jessica Morgan and Ulrich Lehmann that unpack the dominant thematics in Fischer’s work and examine the significance of the materials and production techniques in his sculptural practice.
- GenresArt
650 pages, Paperback
First published June 30, 2013
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May 31, 2017
I was quite impressed with the fairly small sample of Fischer's work that I was exposed to at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Both playful and disquieting, the sculptor is genuinely unpredictable.
The works tend to either be imposingly huge, such as "Adam" an eight foot tall wax statue of a friend, the head of which is lit as a candle, the wax pouring down upon the gallery, or so small as to be hard to discover. The tiny "Crying Horse" almost challenges the viewer not to trip over it. The sense of security some might find in wandering through an art space is thus problematized.
The body is often present in Fischer's work, but rarely in a wholly organic way. Even Adam is, if presented from head to toe, melting before our eyes. In many works, fragmented body parts seem to reach out of the void. In one large work, a headless sculpture of a sitting woman is seemingly abandoned by the artist who then turns the lower half of the sculpture into a pirate ship.
My favorite work was a vibrating table on which was glued a tiny tee cup and an open book, the lines of which were made indecipherable by the table's subtle movements. Fischer wants, literally, to be hard to read.
The works tend to either be imposingly huge, such as "Adam" an eight foot tall wax statue of a friend, the head of which is lit as a candle, the wax pouring down upon the gallery, or so small as to be hard to discover. The tiny "Crying Horse" almost challenges the viewer not to trip over it. The sense of security some might find in wandering through an art space is thus problematized.
The body is often present in Fischer's work, but rarely in a wholly organic way. Even Adam is, if presented from head to toe, melting before our eyes. In many works, fragmented body parts seem to reach out of the void. In one large work, a headless sculpture of a sitting woman is seemingly abandoned by the artist who then turns the lower half of the sculpture into a pirate ship.
My favorite work was a vibrating table on which was glued a tiny tee cup and an open book, the lines of which were made indecipherable by the table's subtle movements. Fischer wants, literally, to be hard to read.
Displaying 1 of 1 review