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Lot Essay
‘I love to think that Fischer could have learned from the paintings of Sigmar Polke this economy of the gaze that produces the game of transparencies and juxtapositions: to plot against the spectators’ gaze, to disorient them, to slow them down, to work in the density’
(P. Falguières, ‘Urs Hero: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in Urs Fischer – Madame Fisscher, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2012, p. 42).
‘Art is like people; you cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences, they are much more complex, much richer’
(U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in B. Curiger, M. Gioni & J. Morgan (eds.), Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 62).
‘The way I see it, my paintings are more like sculptures. I see them as objects on the wall that have a particular surface. The paint applied is just one possible layer’
(U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in B. Curiger, M. Gioni & J. Morgan (eds.), Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 60).
Towering above us, over three metres in height, Urs Fischer’s Your Deaths Your Births engulfs the viewer in a vertiginous, hallucinogenic dreamscape. Through shifting layers of colour, material and imagery, a pair of train tracks carries the eye into a mysterious dark void. As we step back from the shimmering surface, the fog clarifies into a spectral vision of a steam train, careering towards us before dispersing into clouds of billowing mist. Tiny molecular dots vibrate in clusters, refracting a spectrum of green, yellow, blue, red and purple across the filmic, holographic surface of Fischer’s composition. Conceived by the artist as sculptures, his paintings represent multi-media entities that aspire to three-dimensional states. In the present work, the artist layers acrylic, marker, UV-inkjet print and UV-protective lacquer on aluminium and ACM panels to create a fluctuating, metamorphic and inherently unstable pictorial surface. His subjects become disembodied illusions, suspended in, on, behind and in front of the picture plane. ‘I see them as objects on the wall that have a particular surface’, the artist explains. ‘The paint applied is just one possible layer’ (U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 60). Perfectly exemplifying this condition, Your Deaths Your Births was exhibited during the year of its creation in the artist’s first major museum retrospective Urs Fischer: Kir Royal at the Kunsthaus Zurich. In the exhibition, viewers were invited to encounter the work through a gaping hole in the gallery wall, creating a fractured layer of distance that further emphasised the volatile, mercurial nature of its surface.
Incorporating materials as diverse as wax, taxidermy, mirrors and foodstuff, Fischer’s trans-medial practice questions what it means to be an artist in the post-modern era. ‘Art is like people’, he claims, ‘you cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences, they are much more complex, much richer’ (U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 62). By redefining the picture plane as a composite object, stratified like a fossil, Fischer transforms it into a kaleidoscopic site of discovery. The new material reality of his surface converts its subject matter into strange, ghostly apparitions, physically and spatially dislocated. Extending the legacy of Francis Picabia’s Transparencies and Sigmar Polke’s alchemical painterly experiments, Fischer seeks new paradigms for image-making in an uprooted, decentred contemporary world. Like translucent magazine pages layered on top of one another, his works become enclaves of multiplicity and simultaneity. In a statement that speaks directly to the present work, Patricia Falguières has written, ‘I love to think that Fischer could have learned from the paintings of Sigmar Polke this economy of the gaze that produces the game of transparencies and juxtapositions: to plot against the spectators’ gaze, to disorient them, to slow them down, to work in the density’ (P. Falguières, ‘Urs Hero: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in Urs Fischer – Madame Fisscher, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2012, p. 42). Rich in optical illusion, Your Deaths Your Births becomes a kind of theatre – a vision of reality made strange by veils, smoke and mirrors.
(P. Falguières, ‘Urs Hero: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in Urs Fischer – Madame Fisscher, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2012, p. 42).
‘Art is like people; you cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences, they are much more complex, much richer’
(U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in B. Curiger, M. Gioni & J. Morgan (eds.), Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 62).
‘The way I see it, my paintings are more like sculptures. I see them as objects on the wall that have a particular surface. The paint applied is just one possible layer’
(U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in B. Curiger, M. Gioni & J. Morgan (eds.), Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 60).
Towering above us, over three metres in height, Urs Fischer’s Your Deaths Your Births engulfs the viewer in a vertiginous, hallucinogenic dreamscape. Through shifting layers of colour, material and imagery, a pair of train tracks carries the eye into a mysterious dark void. As we step back from the shimmering surface, the fog clarifies into a spectral vision of a steam train, careering towards us before dispersing into clouds of billowing mist. Tiny molecular dots vibrate in clusters, refracting a spectrum of green, yellow, blue, red and purple across the filmic, holographic surface of Fischer’s composition. Conceived by the artist as sculptures, his paintings represent multi-media entities that aspire to three-dimensional states. In the present work, the artist layers acrylic, marker, UV-inkjet print and UV-protective lacquer on aluminium and ACM panels to create a fluctuating, metamorphic and inherently unstable pictorial surface. His subjects become disembodied illusions, suspended in, on, behind and in front of the picture plane. ‘I see them as objects on the wall that have a particular surface’, the artist explains. ‘The paint applied is just one possible layer’ (U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 60). Perfectly exemplifying this condition, Your Deaths Your Births was exhibited during the year of its creation in the artist’s first major museum retrospective Urs Fischer: Kir Royal at the Kunsthaus Zurich. In the exhibition, viewers were invited to encounter the work through a gaping hole in the gallery wall, creating a fractured layer of distance that further emphasised the volatile, mercurial nature of its surface.
Incorporating materials as diverse as wax, taxidermy, mirrors and foodstuff, Fischer’s trans-medial practice questions what it means to be an artist in the post-modern era. ‘Art is like people’, he claims, ‘you cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences, they are much more complex, much richer’ (U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2009, p. 62). By redefining the picture plane as a composite object, stratified like a fossil, Fischer transforms it into a kaleidoscopic site of discovery. The new material reality of his surface converts its subject matter into strange, ghostly apparitions, physically and spatially dislocated. Extending the legacy of Francis Picabia’s Transparencies and Sigmar Polke’s alchemical painterly experiments, Fischer seeks new paradigms for image-making in an uprooted, decentred contemporary world. Like translucent magazine pages layered on top of one another, his works become enclaves of multiplicity and simultaneity. In a statement that speaks directly to the present work, Patricia Falguières has written, ‘I love to think that Fischer could have learned from the paintings of Sigmar Polke this economy of the gaze that produces the game of transparencies and juxtapositions: to plot against the spectators’ gaze, to disorient them, to slow them down, to work in the density’ (P. Falguières, ‘Urs Hero: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, in Urs Fischer – Madame Fisscher, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2012, p. 42). Rich in optical illusion, Your Deaths Your Births becomes a kind of theatre – a vision of reality made strange by veils, smoke and mirrors.