Installation
Urs Fischer’s painting Rose (2024) is on view in the vitrine at Gagosian, rue de Ponthieu, Paris, as part of the artist’s exhibition Beauty at the rue de Castiglione gallery.
In 2010, Fischer began the Problem Paintings series, layering vivid screen-printed images of familiar objects and organic forms—from fixtures and fittings to fruits and vegetables—over precisely rendered enlargements of vintage Hollywood headshots. Rose belongs to this series and shows a glamorous screen actor wearing red lipstick, her face partially obscured by a luscious pink rose with a bright green stem and leaves. The juxtaposition enacts a playful conflict between clarity and secrecy, aesthetic experimentation and symbolic meaning. Evoking the cryptological messaging of Victorian floriography, Rose confronts the viewer with a mischievous, perhaps unsolvable visual conundrum.
#UrsFischer
Urs Fischer: Wave
In this video, Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Winter 2022
The Winter 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Anna Weyant’s Two Eileens (2022) on its cover.
Urs Fischer: Denominator
Urs Fischer sits down with his friend the author and artist Eric Sanders to address the perfect viewer, the effects of marketing, and the limits of human understanding.
Urs Fischer: Lovers
The exhibition Urs Fischer: Lovers at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, brings together works from international public and private collections as well as from the artist’s own archive, alongside new pieces made especially for the exhibition. To mark this momentous twenty-year survey, the artist sits down with the exhibition’s curator, Francesco Bonami, to discuss the installation.
Awol Erizku and Urs Fischer: To Make That Next Move
On the eve of Awol Erizku’s exhibition in New York, he and Urs Fischer discuss what it means to be an image maker, the beauty of blurring genres, the fetishization of authorship, and their shared love for Los Angeles.
Bourse de Commerce
William Middleton traces the development of the new institution, examining the collaboration between the collector François Pinault and the architect Tadao Ando in revitalizing the historic space. Middleton also speaks with artists Tatiana Trouvé and Albert Oehlen about Pinault’s passion as a collector, and with the Bouroullec brothers, who created design features for the interiors and exteriors of the museum.
Related Exhibitions
Related News
Installation
Urs Fischer
Candyfloss
October 12–November 28, 2023
Gagosian, rue de Ponthieu, Paris
Urs Fischer’s painting Candyfloss (2023) is on view in the street-facing vitrine at Gagosian, rue de Ponthieu, Paris, presented along with the artist’s monumental sculpture Wave (2018) at Place Vendôme in Paris as part of Paris+ par Art Basel.
Candyfloss is one of the latest works in Fischer’s series of Problem Paintings, which he began in 2010. In this series, the artist formulates incongruous pairings of photographic portraits with vibrantly colored screenprinted images of inanimate objects. In Candyfloss, Fischer overlays an enlarged picture of a cerise-pink daisy on a digitally altered headshot of a Hollywood actress, obscuring her identity through the blossom’s placement. The visual “problem” resulting from this friction between illegibility and possibility—and from the clash of representational systems suggested by the flower’s mysteriously improbable shadow—is at once surprising and darkly humorous.
Urs Fischer, Candyfloss, 2023 © Urs Fischer
Public Installation
Urs Fischer
Wave
October 14–November 30, 2023
Place Vendôme, Paris
Gagosian is pleased to present Urs Fischer’s public sculpture Wave (2018). The work will be installed at Place Vendôme in Paris from October 14 as part of Paris+ par Art Basel.
Wave is the sixth sculpture in Fischer’s series Big Clays. Despite their imposing scale, these works always begin with a small piece or pieces of clay shaped in the artist’s hand. Fischer describes this process as “a sensual and repetitive gesture, like a bodily motion,” which he ends prior to conscious intervention. After making hundreds of such forms, he selects only one to be digitally scanned and carved at an enlarged scale. Unlike a cast form or a digital replica, the resulting work preserves the nuanced tactility of the original maquette, magnifying its details—down to the artist’s fingerprints—into a monument.
Urs Fischer, Wave, 2018, installation view, Place Vendôme, Paris © Urs Fischer. Photo: Stefan Altenburger
Online Reading
Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney
Headz
The first volume of Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz is available for online reading from December 7 through January 5 as part of Artist Spotlight: Spencer Sweeney. Housed in a screenprinted box, this eighteen-volume collection brings together the vibrant and varied drawings made during HEADZ NYC—a weekly gathering of food, music, and creativity hosted by Urs Fischer, Spencer Sweeney, and Brendan Dugan between October 2017 and July 2018 in New York’s Chinatown. Interspersed among the artworks are photos of the participants and the space of creative collaboration they activated.
Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney: Headz (New York: Kiito-San, 2019)
Museum Exhibitions
Closing this Week
Fairy Tales
Through April 28, 2024
Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au
Fairy Tales explores centuries of beloved folk stories through contemporary art, costumes, immersive installations, and cinema from visual storytellers around the world. The exhibition aims to untangle themes of bravery and justice, loyalty and humility, cunning and aspiration. Work by Rachel Feinstein, Urs Fischer, and Carsten Höller is included.
Rachel Feinstein, Mr. Time, 2015 © Rachel Feinstein
On View
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Richard Prince, Untitled, 2015, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut © Richard Prince
On View
Janus
Through November 24, 2024
Palazzo Diedo, Venice
berggruenarts.org
Janus, appropriately titled after the Roman god of beginnings, is the inaugural exhibition at Palazzo Diedo, a new contemporary arts space in Venice established by Berggruen Arts & Culture. For the exhibition, curated by Mario Codognato, eleven international artists—Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Carsten Höller, Liu We, Ibrahim Mahama, Mariko Mori, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aya Takano, and Lee Ufan—have conceived site-specific interventions in response to the architecture and original features of the eighteenth-century building designed by the acclaimed Venetian architect Andrea Tirali. The Polaroid Foundation has also contributed a special project that invites the participating artists to create an original work using the Polaroid 20×24, the world’s largest instant camera.
Jim Shaw, The Alexander Romances, 2024 (detail) © Jim Shaw. Photo: Jeff McLane
Closed
John Chamberlain
THE TIGHTER THEY’RE WOUND, THE HARDER THEY UNRAVEL
December 15, 2023–April 7, 2024
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
www.aspenartmuseum.org
Curated by Urs Fischer and developed in collaboration with Dia Art Foundation, New York, THE TIGHTER THEY’RE WOUND, THE HARDER THEY UNRAVEL is the first institutional survey in the United States devoted to John Chamberlain in over a decade. Spanning three floors of the museum and arranged in an evocative, cross-temporal mise-en-scène, the exhibition embraces Chamberlain’s love of discovery and intuitive approach to scale, fit, and attachment.
Installation view, John Chamberlain: THE TIGHTER THEY’RE WOUND, THE HARDER THEY UNRAVEL, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, December 15, 2023–April 7, 2024. Artwork © 2024 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Daniel Pérez