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Lot Essay
Lending to Urs Fischer's Pop Art hall of mirrors, Horse / Fraud's giant cigarette packets and oversized chairs join the artist's pantheon of mundane or discarded objects blown up and given the status of "high art" object by means of its uncanny fusion of Andy Warhol's silkscreens and Donald Judd's mirrored boxes. Screen-printed atop an ultra-reflective surface in hyper-real digital detail, Fischer forges an eerie, convoluted assembly of hard, fake veneers and reflected real-world depths. Deconstructing the ordinary office chair and crushed cigarette refuse, Fischer compresses their three dimensionality into a series of two dimensional silkscreened planes and--in a Warholian way--simultaneously reconstructs the objects into a three-dimensional structure that borders on familiarity. With billboard-like appeal, these fetishized objects mercilessly and unrelentingly capture any and all who pass by their reflective picture plane, reminding us of our complicity with the everyday images and items that we have come to be absorbed by.
"In Fischer's installation, as in real life, we encounter quotidian items from the world," Bice Curiger explains of the artist's mysterious ability to illustrate the world through radical means. "Consumer goods accompany us everywhere when we walk along the street. Yet their presence here is slightly more insistent, as though the viewer perceived them while in the grip of a fever... The scale and significance of the objects are fraught with ambiguity... To pass through Fischer's work is to reenact this kind of urban experience in the form of a special mis-en-scéne that zooms in to exclude everything incidental, all the physical trappings of a city" (B. Curiger, "Spaces Generated by Vision or Basements Save Windows", Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 13). Intensely aware of his surroundings, Fischer's art serves to reconstitute our relations with everyday life. In fact, as the artist once argued, "You need to find new ways of disrupting your environment in order to keep it interesting for yourself. Change is healthy. It keeps the mind alive" (U. Fischer quoted in interview with N. Wakefield, in Another Magazine, Spring/Summer 2008, p. 411).
"In Fischer's installation, as in real life, we encounter quotidian items from the world," Bice Curiger explains of the artist's mysterious ability to illustrate the world through radical means. "Consumer goods accompany us everywhere when we walk along the street. Yet their presence here is slightly more insistent, as though the viewer perceived them while in the grip of a fever... The scale and significance of the objects are fraught with ambiguity... To pass through Fischer's work is to reenact this kind of urban experience in the form of a special mis-en-scéne that zooms in to exclude everything incidental, all the physical trappings of a city" (B. Curiger, "Spaces Generated by Vision or Basements Save Windows", Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 13). Intensely aware of his surroundings, Fischer's art serves to reconstitute our relations with everyday life. In fact, as the artist once argued, "You need to find new ways of disrupting your environment in order to keep it interesting for yourself. Change is healthy. It keeps the mind alive" (U. Fischer quoted in interview with N. Wakefield, in Another Magazine, Spring/Summer 2008, p. 411).