ART CITIES:Paris-Urs Fischer
Urs Fischer mines the potential of materials like: clay, steel, and paint to bread and dirt to create works that disorient and bewilder. Through scale distortions, illusion, and the juxtaposition of common objects, his sculptures, paintings, photographs, and large-scale installations explore themes of perception and representation while maintaining a witty irreverence and mordant humor.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Urs Fischer’s next solo exhibition in Paris, has the title “Leo”. Fischer’s candle sculptures exemplify the relationship between permanence and impermanence. Fischer’s newest candle portrait, “Leo (George & Irmelin)” (2019), depicts the actor, environmentalist, and noted art collector Leonardo DiCaprio with his parents, George DiCaprio and Irmelin Indenbirken. Cast entirely in wax, the family is posed in mid-action: George gestures while conversing with Leo, as Irmelin holds Leo in her loving embrace. As with all of Fischer’s candle sculptures, “Leo (George & Irmelin)” will melt slowly over the course of the exhibition, its original composition transmuted into a form dictated by the wayward laws of physics. Captivating in their materiality and haunting in their implications, Fischer’s candles serve as both portraits and meditations of the passing of time. Elaborating on traditions of memento mori, they remind viewers of the transience of life, beauty, and even art itself. Across his protean oeuvre, Fischer frequently evokes art historical genres and motifs with wry self-awareness and humor. In Fischer’s work, the processes of material creation and destruction are often explored through the use of impermanent materials, as in “Bread House” (2004–05), a life-size cabin constructed from loaves of sourdough bread. Embracing transformation and decay while resounding with poetic contradictions, Fischer’s art excavates the potential of its materials and media, producing joyful disorientation and sinister bewilderment. Urs Fischer began to make them in the early 2000s with a series of crudely rendered female nudes, standing upright or lounging in groups. A series of realistic figurative candle portraits followed, including the Venice Biennale in 2011, wher his wax copy of Giambologna’s late-16th Century sculpture “Rape of the Sabine Women” slowly melted, looming over another candle depicting an ordinary man wearing glasses and a sport coat. The candle works, which Fischer has produced since 2001, attest to his mastery of entropy, as well as his simultaneous incorporation and rejection of tradition. The “Marsupiale (Fabrizio)” (2017), which amalgamates a portrait of the Florentine antique dealer Fabrizio Moretti with an oversize bust of Saint Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners. In 2018, Fischer created a candle replica of the art patron and collector Dasha Zhukova, which burned for weeks in the shopfront gallery at Gagosian in London.
Artwork © Urs Fischer
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 14/10-20/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com