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Lot Essay
Arising from a gleaming ground, the smirking mouth and striking eyes of Urs Fischer’s Friday (2016) seem to have been snipped directly from the silver screen. Monumental in scale, the work features two ovoid forms, each containing a section of a man’s face all seemingly collaged from sheets of shiny metal. With its bright, polished surface, Friday formally relates to Fischer’s Mirror Boxes—one of the artist’s most celebrated series in which he silkscreened images of everyday objects onto mirrored cubes—as well as his Problem Paintings, a contemporaneous series juxtaposing headshots from the Golden Age of cinema with unlikely objects: a nail, a radish, the inside of an egg. Indeed, Fischer is a voracious consumer, and he constantly seeks to alter understandings of his surroundings. Despite this forward looking thrust, art historical references are rife in his practice; Friday conjures images of Lee Friedlander’s America by Car photographs, Rene Magritte’s The False Mirror, and the many Surrealist exquisite corpse drawings. Central to Surrealism, however, is the embrace of the unconscious translated into a visual form, yet Fischer’s objects seem less the result of daydream imaginings than the physical expression of a secular magic.
Fischer, whose celebrated solo exhibition recently closed at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, began his career as a photographer studying at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. He soon expanded his interests, taking up sculpture, painting, and installation and continues to weave effortlessly (and prodigiously) between media. Uniting his art is an emphasis on image making. Such an ethos is, at its core, less tied to a genre or specific style than it is rooted in restlessness and cross-pollination. ‘When one remembers photography’s origins in the camera obscura and therefore its initial relationship to architecture and space rather than just a flat planar image,’ writes Nicholas Cullinan, ‘this unlikely relationship in Fischer’s work begins to make more sense’ (N. Cullinan, ‘Urs Fischer’s Objects and Images,’ Parkette, No. 94, 2014, pp 60-61). Indeed, Friday seems neither wholly photographic nor entirely sculptural but instead asks for both haptic and optic encounters. Like all of Fischer’s work, it possesses the power to transform the banal into the spectacular.
Fischer, whose celebrated solo exhibition recently closed at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, began his career as a photographer studying at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. He soon expanded his interests, taking up sculpture, painting, and installation and continues to weave effortlessly (and prodigiously) between media. Uniting his art is an emphasis on image making. Such an ethos is, at its core, less tied to a genre or specific style than it is rooted in restlessness and cross-pollination. ‘When one remembers photography’s origins in the camera obscura and therefore its initial relationship to architecture and space rather than just a flat planar image,’ writes Nicholas Cullinan, ‘this unlikely relationship in Fischer’s work begins to make more sense’ (N. Cullinan, ‘Urs Fischer’s Objects and Images,’ Parkette, No. 94, 2014, pp 60-61). Indeed, Friday seems neither wholly photographic nor entirely sculptural but instead asks for both haptic and optic encounters. Like all of Fischer’s work, it possesses the power to transform the banal into the spectacular.