The Artist/Gavin Brown's Enterprise

Urs Fischer, "Noisette" (2009). Mixed media, dimensions variable.

October 2009 Field Guide

Anthony McCall

Pierpaolo Barzan

Subodh Gupta

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

Artnear

Intersections: Grand Concourse

Andy Warhol: Mr. America

Urs Fischer Aya Takano in New York Celebration or Send-Up? Digging In Koons Goes From Yacht Decorator to Collection Curator Fall’s Best Museum Offerings Rob Pruitt and the Guggenheim Launch an Awards Show Italian Couple Opens Contemporary Collection to the Public

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Two years ago, the Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer broke ground — literally — by demolishing Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in New York’s West Village, transporting viewers into the surreal space of a dirt-filled excavation site framed by pristine gallery walls. This month, he churns up bigger ground for his first large-scale solo presentation in an American museum, at the New Museum — becoming the first individual artist to take over the institution’s galleries, lobby, and stairwells. Fischer is most noted for his sculptures. In the past, he has created a house out of bread and life-size candle wax female nudes that melted after he lit them, works that reveal the inextricable tension between space and material and the paradoxical interplay of creation and destruction. In Agnes Martin (2007-08), featured in this exhibition, spindly structures made of cast foam, which look like frayed threads or branches of nerves, surround a deformed white chair. The device suggests loss, decay, and impermanence — common themes found throughout his seemingly disparate works. The show, which curator Massimiliano Gioni calls an "introspective," will showcase past sculptures along with new works, which include continuations of Fischer’s abstract aluminum sculpture Marguerite de Ponty (2006-08) and 50 silk-screened mirror boxes. 

newmuseum.org

"Urs Fischer" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2009 Table of Contents.