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Lot Essay
The Swiss artist Urs Fischer is renowned for harnessing the unexpected in his oeuvre. His experimental practice is defined by an aesthetic that juxtaposes seemingly opposed elements, from the abstract and the representational, to the straightforward and the surreal, the material and the immaterial, to the monumental and the invisible. Fischer’s art encompasses sculpture and installation, photography, drawing, painting and digital montage, combining a dizzying array of media in increasingly unpredictable and innovative ways. Executed in 2015, Sodium is a monumental work that epitomizes Fischer’s unorthodox tactics, playing with art historical tradition and optical illusion, with the aim of dismantling the viewer’s perceptive faculties. At first glimpse, Sodium appears to be an abstract painting, complete with coursing passages of pigment in clashing empurpled pastels that fluctuate from broad strokes of near black to palest violet. Sweeping gestures of fleshy pink, in which the trace of the artist’s hand is almost tangible, recall the clotted palette of Jean Fautrier’s World War II Hostages series, or the muted colors of Philip Guston’s late, figurative works. Yet, on closer inspection, the impasto-laden surface of Fischer’s painting reveals itself to be perfectly flat, its abstract composition painted by the artist and then silkscreened over a magnified photograph of his own face. Laid on its side, Fischer’s blown-up features barely register through his expressive motions: the viewer discerns hints of an eye socket, its pupil obscured with a dab of purple paint, the outline of a nostril, fine lines above the crease of an eyelid, and the shadow of the artist’s lower lip. Transformed in this way, intimate details of the artist’s countenance are lost, and any attempt at recognition disintegrates behind a veneer of clearly legible, albeit abstract marks; such a paradox lies at the heart of Fischer’s practice, which continually pits systems of representation against one another.
Sodium is one of a series of paintings made by Fischer in 2015, which take his own face as a starting point. He observes that what it means to be an artist “becomes a complex thing the older you get: you become limited to yourself and these limitations are what afford you artistic growth” (U. Fischer, quoted in an interview with M. Gnyp, in M. Gnyp, Made in Mind: Myths and Realities of the Contemporary Artist, Stockholm, 2013, p. 96). Fischer’s artistic career began with the study of photography at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. That he should return to the medium—the genesis of his career as an artist—to probe his own identity seems poetic. In works such as Sodium he entirely deconstructs the art of photography, pushing its traditional boundaries and demonstrating the unending depths of his own artistic innovation. The series to which Sodium belongs derives from Fischer’s Problem Paintings of 2011, a group of works in which vintage studio portraits of old Hollywood stars are overlaid with quotidian objects, such as a nail, a banana, or a half-smoked cigarette. With each unexpected intervention, these darkly humorous pictures modify the conventional relationship between viewer and subject, object and ground. A voracious reader of art historical texts, Fischer often references canonical genres in his work from portraiture—as in the Problem Paintings—to nudes and landscapes. With its realization of Fischer’s own self-portrait, Sodium invokes elements of the publicity headshots so carefully lampooned in its direct predecessors. Yet, fragmented by its close-up view, more prominently, it takes on the trope of the partial figure. Influenced by the possibility of photographic cropping, Fischer updates this legacy for a new generation, drawing together two- and three-dimensional qualities from the conventionally distinct genres of painting, sculpture and photography to disorienting effect.
Fischer takes a highly sculptural approach to his two-dimensional practice, noting, “…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 an interview with M. Gioni, in B. Curinger, M. Gioni & J. Morgan, eds., Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New York, 2009, p. 60). In Sodium, Fischer deftly manipulates a wealth of different materials including, but not limited to, aluminum, gesso, acrylic paint, and silkscreen. The result is a technically complex and expertly finished piece, which echoes the tradition of collage instigated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the beginning of the 20th century, whilst conjuring up the Surrealist activities of artists such as Rene Magritte, who often covered his subjects’ faces with commonplace objects, thereby obscuring their identities, both physically and psychologically—something that is also clearly referenced by the Problem Paintings. At the same time, Fischer’s distinctly material and avant-garde painting practice speaks to another element of his oeuvre, which delves into theories of decay and entropy. The artist’s memorable figurative waxworks, which have been an integral element of his oeuvre since 2001, are meticulously designed to exactly replicate their subjects. When set alight, they melt into pools of their own matter, in a precisely timed and total disfiguration. Similarly, in Sodium, the obfuscation of Fischer’s own likeness by coarse brushstrokes disintegrates any representational meaning and submits the once intelligible image to a gradual decline, mirroring the process of decay invoked in his wax sculptures. Yet, as in the sculptures, something remains. In Sodium, it is left to the viewer to piece the artist’s fractured image together, and to attempt to re-establish his eroded identity. For Fischer, despite what might seem a moribund approach to art making, this process is far from morbid. “Life is one long decay, no?” He observes, “There’s a lot of beauty in it” (U. Fischer, quoted in D. Solway, “Studio Visit: Urs Fischer,” W Magazine, April 2012). At once visually stimulating and philosophically invigorating, Sodium encapsulates Fischer’s attitude and celebrates the principle of deconstruction that marks his entire creative output.
Sodium is one of a series of paintings made by Fischer in 2015, which take his own face as a starting point. He observes that what it means to be an artist “becomes a complex thing the older you get: you become limited to yourself and these limitations are what afford you artistic growth” (U. Fischer, quoted in an interview with M. Gnyp, in M. Gnyp, Made in Mind: Myths and Realities of the Contemporary Artist, Stockholm, 2013, p. 96). Fischer’s artistic career began with the study of photography at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. That he should return to the medium—the genesis of his career as an artist—to probe his own identity seems poetic. In works such as Sodium he entirely deconstructs the art of photography, pushing its traditional boundaries and demonstrating the unending depths of his own artistic innovation. The series to which Sodium belongs derives from Fischer’s Problem Paintings of 2011, a group of works in which vintage studio portraits of old Hollywood stars are overlaid with quotidian objects, such as a nail, a banana, or a half-smoked cigarette. With each unexpected intervention, these darkly humorous pictures modify the conventional relationship between viewer and subject, object and ground. A voracious reader of art historical texts, Fischer often references canonical genres in his work from portraiture—as in the Problem Paintings—to nudes and landscapes. With its realization of Fischer’s own self-portrait, Sodium invokes elements of the publicity headshots so carefully lampooned in its direct predecessors. Yet, fragmented by its close-up view, more prominently, it takes on the trope of the partial figure. Influenced by the possibility of photographic cropping, Fischer updates this legacy for a new generation, drawing together two- and three-dimensional qualities from the conventionally distinct genres of painting, sculpture and photography to disorienting effect.
Fischer takes a highly sculptural approach to his two-dimensional practice, noting, “…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 an interview with M. Gioni, in B. Curinger, M. Gioni & J. Morgan, eds., Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New York, 2009, p. 60). In Sodium, Fischer deftly manipulates a wealth of different materials including, but not limited to, aluminum, gesso, acrylic paint, and silkscreen. The result is a technically complex and expertly finished piece, which echoes the tradition of collage instigated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the beginning of the 20th century, whilst conjuring up the Surrealist activities of artists such as Rene Magritte, who often covered his subjects’ faces with commonplace objects, thereby obscuring their identities, both physically and psychologically—something that is also clearly referenced by the Problem Paintings. At the same time, Fischer’s distinctly material and avant-garde painting practice speaks to another element of his oeuvre, which delves into theories of decay and entropy. The artist’s memorable figurative waxworks, which have been an integral element of his oeuvre since 2001, are meticulously designed to exactly replicate their subjects. When set alight, they melt into pools of their own matter, in a precisely timed and total disfiguration. Similarly, in Sodium, the obfuscation of Fischer’s own likeness by coarse brushstrokes disintegrates any representational meaning and submits the once intelligible image to a gradual decline, mirroring the process of decay invoked in his wax sculptures. Yet, as in the sculptures, something remains. In Sodium, it is left to the viewer to piece the artist’s fractured image together, and to attempt to re-establish his eroded identity. For Fischer, despite what might seem a moribund approach to art making, this process is far from morbid. “Life is one long decay, no?” He observes, “There’s a lot of beauty in it” (U. Fischer, quoted in D. Solway, “Studio Visit: Urs Fischer,” W Magazine, April 2012). At once visually stimulating and philosophically invigorating, Sodium encapsulates Fischer’s attitude and celebrates the principle of deconstruction that marks his entire creative output.