ART CITIES:San Francisco-Urs Fischer

© Urs Fischer, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
© Urs Fischer, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

 

Since Urs Fischer first began showing his work, in the mid-‘90s, in Europe, he has produced an enormous number of objects, drawings, collages, and room-size installations. Imbued with their own mortality, his sculptures and installations cultivate the experiential function of art. Fischer incorporates elements of performance and Pop art to create an oeuvre that is distinctly current, and as witty as it is macabre.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo Gagosian Gallery Archive

In his solo exhibition “Mind Moves”, Urs Fischer presents new sculptures and paintings that bring together various formal experiments in which space is divided, sliced, opened, and closed. In Fischer’s linear sculptures, gestural scribbles seem described in the air with the spontaneity of a drawing on page or screen. The three lines: in black and white, red-brown, and a color gradient, are activated by one’s movement around them. Depending on the vantage point, they are either deceptively two-dimensional or nearly disappear, thin and blade-like. Meanwhile, the walls of this unpredictable, oddly digital, zone are punctuated by bold paintings on cut-out aluminum panels. In these works, facial features are rendered as intersecting organic forms. Photographed fragments of Fischer’s own lips, nose, and eyebrows are freed from self-portraiture, instead becoming shapes that slide and mutate, melting and hardening in bright hues. With this series, Fischer recalls the compositional structures of grand landscape painting, presenting the two halves of his own face as topographical masses, propping gently against one another. Returning again to the idea and role of interactivity in art, Fischer has also fashioned several sculptures that serve as a leisure environment possessed of an ambiguous materiality. From afar, the four sculptures appear as simple pieces of furniture, molded in clay. However, one sits down and is surprised to find that the two armchairs and two ottomans are not made of clay, but rather a pliant, foam-like material.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, Duration: 21/10-23/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com