Urs Fischer – Tables, Heads, and Arms – Gagosian Gallery

Urs Fischer
Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery

Urs Fischer – Tables, Heads, and Arms Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of tables by Urs Fischer. Friday, December 28, 2012–Thursday, January 31, 2013.]]>

Source: Gagosian Gallery

Continuously searching for new sculptural solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread; enlivened emptyspace with mechanistic jokes; deconstructed objects and then replicated them; and transferred others fromthree dimensions to two and back again via photographic processes. He combines daring formal adventuresin space, scale, and material with a mordant sense of humor. Reinvesting traditional art historical genres(still life, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and interiors) with an abundance of rich and surprising forms—suchas cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, kinetic objects, andtexts—he ceaselessly explores the intersection of art and everyday life.

The exhibition title, a collision of furniture and body parts, gives le corps exquis another turn of the screw.The works to which the title alludes are tables that combine large resin-coated photomontages withmulticolored steel geometric bases. The jokey surrealist montages juxtapose images both found andmanipulated—a pair of sausages, a cartoon snail, a graffiti-covered wall, an open mouth, a Hong Kongsupermarket. Blurring the distinctions between photography, collage, sculpture, and furniture, the tables areobjects both aesthetic and useful, filling the gallery with a presence that is at once visually arresting andsocially convivial.

Urs Fischer was born in 1973 in Zurich, and studied at the Schule für Gestaltung, Zurich. His work is includedin many important public and private collections worldwide. Recent major exhibitions include “Kir Royal,”Kunsthaus Zurich (2004); “Not My House Not My Fire,” Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004); “MaryPoppins,” Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston,Texas (2006); “Marguerite de Ponty,”New Museum, New York (2009–10); “Oscar the Grouch,” The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut(2010–11); “Skinny Sunrise,” Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2012); and “Madame Fisscher,” Palazzo Grassi, Venice(2012), as well as the Biennale di Venezia in 2003, 2007, and 2011.

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