Battito di Ciglia
Urs Fischer
Massimo De Carlo inaugurates its 2016-2017 season in Milan with an exhibition in two parts by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer.
Urs Fischer is the first artist to exhibit in Massimo De Carlo’s two spaces: at the recently inaugurated space at Palazzo Belgioioso and in the gallery’s headquarters on Via Ventura.
Shifting between the familiar and the unknown, Urs Fischer’s world is populated by sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings that construct an infinite anthology of mutations. With wit and an often-dark sense of humour, Fischer’s work provokes and evokes, playing with archetypes through the radical transformation of materials.
In the converted warehouse venue of Via Ventura Urs Fischer has created a microcosm of small- scale hand-painted and raw bronze sculptures. The twenty-six sculptures are like poetic vignettes that depict unusual interactions: they are delicate yet at the same time imposing, comical and shadowy as if they were hiding an allegorical secret. The gallery is transformed into a dazing miniature dreamlike tableau that captures moments in time: here these humorous reveries take the form of a satirical play on ordinariness. A barefoot man crawling into a crushed soda can, a nude lady reclining on a chaise longue next to a snail, a crying horse, a rat playing a piano: all these sculptures build a kaleidoscopic anthology of Urs Fischer’s imaginary, drawn from fragments of his career and aesthetics.
In the newly opened exhibition space in Piazza Belgioioso are two new sculptures: using photography, painting, and glass-making Urs Fischer has created two pairs of oversized, highly realistic eyeballs. These almost cartoonish sculptures reflect the viewer and the space at the same time, enhancing the uncomfortable feeling of being followed by a disturbing gaze. Battito di Ciglia is a light-hearted investigation of scale, perception and observation that challenges the spatiality of the gallery and the contemplation of the viewer by playing with key themes of Urs Fischer’s practice: irrationality and darkness, playfulness and research, daydream and sombreness.
Artist
Urs Fischer was born in 1973 in Zürich, in Switzerland; he lives and works in New York.
Working with collage, drawing, sculpture, and most notably installation, Urs Fischer is known worldwide for large-scale sculptures and installations that explore a wide range of materials from popular culture, focusing on making objects borrowed from everyday life. “Everybody likes objects; everybody likes different objects”, he has said. “It comes down to what objects you want to put in your art.”
One of Fischer’s interests is the spontaneous process of creation and decay of materials over time. A primary example is Untitled (2011), presented at the Venice Biennale the same year – an uncanny reproduction of Giambologna’s sculpture Rape of the Sabine Women made of wax and slowly melting over the exhibition space. Another recent trajectory of Fischer’s artistic research relates to the possibility of creating innovative objects and shapes in the virtual world. In 2022 he presented the digital sculptures CHAOS #1–#500 at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, featuring computer-generated objects that would orbit and intersect with one another.
Whether utilizing ephemeral mediums such as soft wax and foodstuffs, or digitalized objects, at the core of Fischer’s practice remains the mining of the endless possibilities offered by materials and textures.