source: fawnreview
Crammed into a small room in London at the moment, is a multicoloured tropical storm.
Droplets the size of pears are suspended in the air, in an array of pastel and acid colours. The droplets are made of clay and are held mid motion by fine wire. They are raining down or decapitated life sized clay models; reclining on sofas apparently unperturbed by their headless state. Visitors to the gallery must dodge the rain drops as they weave their way around the room; forced into a continual dance around the rain.
The scene is an absurd one. It is the handiwork of Swiss artist Urs Fischer who, along with his assistants has filled London gallery Sadie Coles HQ with the hand crafted clay installation he called ‘Melodrama’.
Over the course of the exhibition (which runs until January), the clay will naturally bend, droop and drop off; like the rain droplets above the figures heads, already on their descent to the gallery floor. Perhaps there is some wider message here about the human condition, decay and temporality.
But, before they can ponder the dark repercussions of such a theme, visitors are lead on a dizzying dance dodging the rain drops around their head. The piece’s title, ‘Melodrama’, is a perfect description of this absurd yet captivating storm.
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source: mymodernmet
Inside, it’s raining a rainbow of colors in this installation by Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer. Installed at the Sadie Coles HQ in London, Melodrama consists of 3,000 plaster raindrops suspended from the ceiling with barely visible monofilament. Movement throughout the space is guided by the placement of the oversized, cartoon-like drops, which look as if they are truly falling from a storm cloud overhead.
Formed in a variety of pastel colors, the installation produces a playful feel throughout the room. As a result, it seems like the room is about to fill up with puddles of pink, purple, orange, yellow, and light blue. Sitting in direct contrast to the rainfall are a number of headless figurative clay sculptures placed directly underneath the storm. According to the project statement, “Collectively, these sculptures describe an earthbound world of disorderly, golem-like forms in contrast with the symphony of suspended shapes above.”
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source: taboofart
Urs Fischer’s show at Sadie Cole’s Soho gallery is without a doubt visually attractive. It centres on an installation of 3,000 plaster raindrops suspended throughout the gallery. Titled Melodrama, the raindrops encompass a spectrum of shades from green to lilac, massing together into a gently psychedelic storm cloud which weaves in a swirling movement through the space. Yet their forms are incongruously physical – each droplet is a bulbous pendant cast from a hand-modelled prototype, and hangs from the ceiling by lengths of near-invisible monofilament.
About this show, Paul Yeung with Time Out London says that ‘There’s a density to this piece, but somehow a lightness too; as if air molecules had become visible. A bizarre feeling emerges – am I underwater or on the ground? Am I wet or dry?’. Dense and light at the same time, ugh? I don’t think so, I think this show works at two levels: the material one and the chromatic one. There is no lightness here and the rain drops do not look like rain drops at all but as re used left overs from one of those ‘cake shaped’ phallic Yayoi Kusama ‘sculptures’ that Victoria Miro is actually selling like…well…cakes, round the corner from Sadie Coles.
The show is composed by a group of clay sofas and reclining torsos arranged as allusion to the Venus and the Mirror or the Hermaphrodite Borghese, to give just two examples that the artist may not even know, but without any sophistication of shape of form. I am saying that the artist might even ignore the source to which he is alluding because when the Hermaphrodite was unearthed at the Villa Borghese in 1600, Gianlorenzo Bernini was commissioned with the sculpture of his/her mattress which soon became one of the main attractions of that master piece. With Fischer there is no time for such sophistications so the bed is made of heavy and shapeless chunks of clay arranged as flat tectonics plates one on top of the other which seem to hold on top of them, a decapitated female body. Although that decapitation functions as an index of another sort of allusion which is closer to surrealism and the art of the avant guard, the truth is that this is just a pose.
Maybe this is the reason why the gallery’s (Sadie Coles’) press release comes illustrated by the artist playing and joking on top of one of the clay chaise longs. So to summarise, we have five or six decapitaded mannequins made of clay on top of very basic chaise longs, also made of clay, on one side, and on the other side a rain of chunky pink and fluo drops carefully hung on top. I believe that this show deploys the media of installation and sculpture so insufficiently that there is no other choice than putting them to play against each other hoping that the viewer would not deconstruct the experience and decides to just go with the flow of the ‘entertainment’ experience.
The problem is that an installation is pure because it is constantly referring to the conditions of sculpture as a media so this show mainly works as a series of sculptures drawing attention to themselves as (bad) sculptures. To illustrate this, let’s read the way the gallery indicates how the is supposed to behave in front of them: ‘Fischer skews our sense of scale – viewers become Lilliputians within the sea of oversize drops – while simultaneously he effaces basic distinctions between outside and inside, architecture and landscape. We are required to pass through narrow channels, to the extent that it is perhaps impossible to perceive the work in its totality. The raindrops therefore dramatise – and radically extend – Charles Baudelaire’s idea that sculpture has “a hundred different points of view”, presenting a limitless number of facets and avenues’. How did Baudelaire got here truly shocks me but the first impression is that both gallery and artist are interested in conditioning the visitor physical movement but isn’t that what sculpture is all about? To quote Baudelaire in order to tell me that a sculpture should be experienced ‘in the round’ depending on the ‘conditionings’ of place and installation is a truism. The problem with that ‘truism’ is that in this show is presented as the main theme of the show. At this point, the show disintegrates in front of the viewer’s very eyes.
Having said that, I saw the Cuban collective group Los Carpinteros doing a very similar thing with rain drops and any clay Rebecca Warren sculpture would put these concoctions to shame. The art critic with Time Out seems, as usual, shocked by what he cannot explain or understand so he feels compelled to turn the aporia into an existencial moment of wisdom by saying: ‘So what’s the melodrama that Fischer is referring to? The art world? Humanity? Perhaps he’s saying that sometimes we just need to lie down, and realise how ridiculous – and extraordinary – life can be’. I guess this is the problem with installations in the art world, they start as mere illustrations of a joke and very soon claim the status of paradoxical existentialism. Just a thought.
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source: xuku-vablogspot
Urs Fischer materializa la fantasía, da forma a motivos y acciones que rara vez ocurren en el mundo visible. Siguiendo un símil pictórico, su paleta es de las más variadas de cuantas pueden encontrarse hoy en el panorama internacional. El artista suizo es capaz de trabajar en ámbitos antitéticos y es, así, uno de los mejores referentes para entender la deriva que ha tomado la escultura en las últimas décadas, su heterogeneidad, su radicalidad, el enorme espectro de posibilidades físicas y objetuales que ofrece. La escultura de Urs Fischer camina entre diferentes estados físicos.
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source: agencevertu
Urs Fischer
Né à Zurich (Suisse) en 1973, vit et travaille entre Los Angeles, Zurich et Berlin.
Urs Fischer est un « sculpteur sculpteur » sans l’aspect passéiste que suggère cette notion. Comme Dieter Roth, Franz West, Charles Ray et Paul Thek, il est avant tout investi dans la tradition sculpturale sans être traditionnel.
Urs Fischer emploie des matériaux qui sont disponibles dans les quincailleries à proximité de son atelier (bois, cire, polystyrène, miroir, verre, pigment, plastique, colle) aussi bien que des objets trouvés et des matières organiques tels que des fruits.
Avec une virtuosité désinvolte, il transforme toutes ces marchandises en des sculptures puissantes, fabriquant souvent ses expositions in situ. Son sens de l’humour aigu et son répertoire de blagues par lesquelles il s’auto-déprécie nourrissent cet art de l’improvisation.
La source de sa radicalité ne peut pas uniquement être attribuée à l’innovation de formes et de processus, mais à son engagement paradoxalement classique dans les genres historiques de l’art.
Fischer a construit avant tout sa pratique sur un dialogue avec le genre historique de la Vanité, ou plus exactement de la nature morte.
Il travaille souvent autour d’objets ordinaires de la vie (chaises, tables , verres, lits, étagères, etc.) qu’il modifie ou transforme afin de les rendre aussi maladroits, confus ou accablés que les sujets qui sont supposés les utiliser.
Parmi les objets ménagers présents dans son oeuvre, les chaises occupent la place d’honneur.
Elles ne sont pas de simples réceptacles pour le corps humain. Elles sont plus exactement des prothèses pour la psyché et ont autant de variations que Fischer a d’humeurs et d’envies.
L’exposition d’Urs Fischer dans l’Espace 315 est la première présentation de son travail à Paris. Il a été remarqué récemment par des expositions en galeries (Galerie Eva Presenthuber, Zurich, Sadie Coles HQ, Londres : Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York) et à Venise, où il a exposé dans la section « Préludes » de la Biennale d’art contemporain 2003.
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source: actual-artru
Урс Фишер (Urs Fischer) — один из ярких представителей постмодернизма, его инсталляции и шутливые фигуры изменяют форму комнаты в прямом и переносном смысле. Проламывая стены в галереях, он раскрывает возможные перспективы, что напоминает чем-то работы Гордона Матта-Кларка, который, как известно, перекраивал дома, предназначенные под снос, вырезая куски фундаментов, полов, стен и фасадов, тем самым полностью меняя облик здания. Фишер старается построить новую реальность и соединить противоречивые вещи.
Фишер занимается возрождением исторических художественных жанров, таких как обнаженная натура, натюрморт, портрет и скульптурный пейзаж. Художника интересуют будничные объекты, которые нас окружают, он находит их сложными, удивительными и в то же время банальными в своей повседневности. Урс не использует редимейдов, а создает предметы заново. Для работы он применяет всевозможные материалы, такие как стекло, пенопласт, дерево, зеркала, воск, фрукты и многое другое.
Например, в своих ранних работах художник соединил половинки груши и яблока, баклажана и луковицы, огурца и банана. Подвесил каждую пару на нейлоновый шнур и оставил гнить.
В 2004 году им была создана инсталляция из воска «What if the phone rings». Это изготовленные в натуральную величину три обнаженные женские фигуры с зажжёнными фитилями, которые таяли и растекались цветными восковыми потеками на протяжении всей выставки.
Самой известной инсталляцией Ури является «You». Это была большая яма, сделанная в полу галереи и заполненная землей.
Для работ Фишера характерно постоянное изменение и трансформация, на протяжении всего времени, без контроля и вмешательства художника. Вкладывая немалые деньги в свои работы, он поражает и шокирует обывателей собственным искусством, которое находится на грани, между творчеством и банальным эпатажем.