Urs Fischer

born 1973 in Zurich, Switzerland
lives and works in New York, USA, and Zurich

Urs Fischer didn’t have a lot of art training, although he did study photography at the Schule für Gestaltung, Zurich. It was while in Amsterdam looking at artists studios that the art bug hit. A great many people without formal training in the arts produce amazing visual works – grassroots art, serve-yourself art, amateur art, art brut etc  – and they bring an unconscious, very intuitive approach to the problems of communication. Fischer is a bit like that, working ad hoc, bringing whatever materials are at hand to make his sculptural vignettes. He’ll take an established genre – like still life, portraiture or landscape – and revitalise it using unstable materials and set them in motion, with their interaction over time being the work, not the immutable museum-ready art object. This interest in the ephemeral implies an understanding that all objects may enter the world as new, but they don’t remain like that for long: everything dematerialises sooner or later.

In a series from 2000, Fischer screwed together half an onion and half an eggplant, half a cucumber and half a banana, and half a pear and half an apple. Each pair was hung from a nylon string and left to decay, the forces of nature alternately attracting or repelling within each coupling. In 2004, he made a life-size cabin out of loaves of sourdough bread, expandable foam, and wood. While art museums may try and keep objects on artificial life-support, Bread house was allowed to decay over time, shedding crumbs on the floor and emitting a noticeably yeasty odour. The same year, Fischer sculpted three life-size female nudes out of wax and then hand-painted them in vaguely sexual poses. Wicks were then set into them and set alight. Over the course of the exhibition, the figures melted away into puddles on the floor.

Inside Gavin Brown’s Enterprise gallery in New York in 2003, Fischer jackhammered a crater two-and-a-half metres deep, surrounded by a thin ledge of concrete floor about a half a metre wide, which allowed intrepid viewers to inch around the hole. The piece was called You. A sign at the door cautioned: THE INSTALLATION IS PHYSICALLY DANGEROUS AND INHERENTLY INVOLVES THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.

Alongside his friends and collaborators Ugo Rondinone and Martin Boyce, Fischer’s way of making art in the 21st century has emerged as a kind of punk reprise of the 1960s, a time that generated Fluxus and arte povera. With an unapologetically styleless art, Fischer, Rondinone and Boyce root around in the compost of banal everyday culture, trying to find a space somewhere between the devil of judgmental politics and the deep blue sea of commercial imperatives. One that – like the big hole called You – sets us on the edge, psychically, aesthetically and politically.

Read more about Urs Fischer’s 2007 Kaldor project.

See also Urs Fischer, Sadie Coles HQ.