In the last year, Urs Fisher, created paintings digitally, inventing things, rooms and spaces using color and light.
On a screen, as opposed to paper or canvas, he is able to paint with light itself, moving the illuminated pixels around, juxtaposing clean lines and gradients and reflecting on subtle atmospheric changes across day and night, summer and winter, Los Angeles and New York.
Screen printed on aluminum panels, the paintings in this exhibition – vertical compositions divided into several rectangular passages – take the scale of modern abstraction, yet depict imaginary worlds inside and out. At the windows they often appear: one glows behind a white fluffy curtain, overlooks swaying palm trees; another reflects a sunrise or sunset, with a still life on a table just visible through fingerprints on the glass; and another frames a building across the street, where nine other windows reveal scattered, fragmented views of the California. In other paintings, Fischer imagines canvases hanging on walls, struck by bands and squares of light pouring from an unseen source. The imaginary paintings and sculptures depict animals, food, city streets or messy brushstrokes, but they, like light, exist only in Fischer's constructed environments; they don't need to adhere to any history, law, or logic.
Fischer presents characters and drawings that seem capable of disappearing at any moment. In one painting, a small orange bird sits on a branch, floating in a dark gray sky. Though its paws are sharply focused, its body becomes a globe of vapor, glowing within the surrounding clouds.
And in an eerie sculptural ecosystem below, two motorized slugs slowly wander through the gallery, leaving slime trails in their wake. These shimmering lines, which evaporate over time, wind across the floor, uniting the other sculptures – a smoking volcano, a snowman, a palm tree – in an ephemeral, ephemeral landscape. Looming over the scene, the surrounding paintings form vivid, even cinematic backdrops: a montage of disparate settings for a small, peculiar world.
Urs Fischer was born in Zurich in 1973 and lives and works in New York.
Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Marseille, France; Fondation Carmignac, Paris; Kunstmuseum Basel; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; and Art Museum of Southern Switzerland, Lugano, Switzerland. Recent exhibitions include Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum, New York (2009-10); 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2012); Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2013); YES, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece (2013); Small Axe, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2013); Mon cher …, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France (2016); and The Public & the Private, Legion of Honor, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts (2017).
Ph: Urs Fisher-Gagosian
URS FISHER
456 North Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, ca 90210
