ART CITIES:Geneva-Urs Fischer-False Friends
The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art established in Geneva in 1983 by collector Dakis Joannou, since its creation, theFoundation has invited a range of artists and curators to generate creative interpretations of the collection in exhibitions held at various museums around the world. Celebrating its 33rd Anniversary DESTE presents for the first time in Geneva a selection of works from the Dakis Joannou Collection.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: DESTE Foundation Archive
The exhibition “Urs Fischer–False Friends” at the Museum of Art and History of Geneva, is conceived as an combination between a solo and a group exhibition, pairs works by a range of highly recognized artists with 20 works by Urs Fischer. Establishing unexpected connections between artworks and aesthetics, methods and materials, the exhibition traces similarities and differences among a group of artists whose work has animated and sustained critical debates, offering a reading of the Dakis Joannou Collection as a field traversed by lines of tension that trace both elective affinities and striking variations. In the first room of the exhibition, Urs Fischer’s sculptures, paintings, and installations are interspersed with works by Jeff Koons and Fischli & Weiss, which appear to reinterpret ancient statuary traditions. Koons’s busts both celebrate and undermine the monumentality that signals official representations of power, and a similar attitude recurs in many works throughout the exhibition, particularly in Fischer’s and Maurizio Cattelan’s sculptures. A darker sensibility pervades other sections of the exhibition, where familiar objects assume uncanny presences. Cindy Sherman’s ghostly apparitions contrast with one of Robert Gober’s early dollhouses, whose eeriness is also juxtaposed with Fischer’s melting candles and his aluminum cast of a piano that seems to liquefy like wax. In the final gallery of the museum, the mirrored sculptures of Fischer initiate a succession of artworks in which surfaces and materials play off one another in multiple reflections, the inflated forms of Jeff Koons’s are in dialogue with Martin Kippenberger’s pneumatic sculpture and one of Koons’s paintings is presented near the crumbling walls of Fischer’s “Bread House”. Participating artists: Pawel Althamer, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Fischli & Weiss, Robert Gober, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith.
Info: Curator Massimiliano Gioni, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, Rue Charles-Galland 2, Geneva, Duration: 27/4-17/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://institutions.ville-geneve
