Urs Fischer

Featuring over 100 works and documentation of forty exhibitions and installations both public and private, New York-based artist Urs Fischer (born 1973) presents six years of work in this substantial volume. Arranged chronologically, this book allows the reader to follow Fischer's developments in form and his frequent adventure into whimsy. The artist's instinct for design is evident not only in his individual works but also in his clarity of vision for a space, beautifully illustrated in this volume. Sculpture inherently has physical presence and Fischer utilizes this to manipulate the viewer's perception of reality. Encountering the immense and the minuscule, the ever-changing and the static, a viewer must reconcile with his or her own presence in time. With this volume, the reader is invited to experience significant ephemeral, collaborative and interactive works in context in over 400 pages plus gatefold inserts.

Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years.

Urs Fischer’s work explores the genres of classical art history (still lifes, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and interiors) at the intersection with everyday life—in cast sculptures and assemblages, paintings, digital montages, spatial installations, mutating or kinetic objects, and texts. This volume includes fifty-five color illustrations from Urs Fischer’s Beds and Problem Paintings show that was exhibited at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles from February 23–April 7, 2012. This was the artist’s first major solo exhibition with the gallery. Beds and Problem Paintings was designed by the artist, and the images within the book include installation photos from the exhibition as well as photographs taken by the artist.

Phantom Paintings gathers several series of paintings on aluminum panel produced over the last three years by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer (born 1973). From far away many of these paintings appear to be large-scale gestural abstractions, but on closer inspection the viewer detects total flatness--the abstract paint marks were actually photographed and silkscreened on top of images of personal spaces, creating an image of abstraction rather than the abstraction itself. This process allows a largeness of motion and an immediacy, as two representational systems clash. In other works, the abstractions obstruct images taken from vintage Hollywood publicity headshots as well as close-up photographs of the artist's own face. Finally, bold paintings on cutout aluminum panels push the limits of line, color and shape, transforming facial features into intersecting organic shapes that slide and mutate in a new form of landscape painting.

"Bound in a tête-bêche format as a reversible book with two front covers, Urs Fischer: YES documents two iterations of Urs Fischer's ongoing collaborative project of the same name, in which individuals from all walks of life worked together to populate two very different landscapes with a profusion of sculptures. Filling the warehouse-like space of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles and the sun-washed terrain surrounding the DESTE Foundation project space in a former slaughterhouse on the Greek island of Hydra, collaborators joined Fischer in making figures and animals out of unfired clay, which were left to disintegrate over time."--Publisher's description.

Chef Mina Stone has been cooking delicious lunches at Urs Fischer's Brooklyn-based art studio for the past five years and producing private gallery dinners in the New York art world since 2006. Cooking for Artists presents more than 70 of Stone's family-style recipes inspired by her Greek heritage and her love of simple, fresh, seasonal food. The book is designed by Fischer and includes drawings by Hope Atherton, Darren Bader, Matthew Barney, Alex Eagleton, Urs Fischer, Cassandra MacLeod, Elizabeth Peyton, Rob Pruitt, Peter Regli, Josh Smith, Spencer Sweeney and Philippos Theodorides--all members of the community of artists that delights in Stone's cooking.

A legendary painting by Rembrandt forms the centerpiece of this exploration of self-portraits by leading artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published to commemorate an exhibition presented by Gagosian in partnership with English Heritage, this stunning volume centers on Rembrandt's masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c. 1665), from the collection of Kenwood House in London. The painting is considered to be Rembrandt's greatest late self-portrait and is accompanied here by examples of the genre from leading artists of the past one hundred years. These include works by Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucian Freud, and Pablo Picasso, as well as contemporary artists such as Georg Baselitz, Glenn Brown, Urs Fischer, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Rudolf Stingel, among others. Also featured is a new work by Jenny Saville, created in response to Rembrandt's masterpiece. Full-color plates of the works, generous details, and installation views of the exhibition accompany an expansive essay by art historian David Freedberg that provides a close look at the self-portraits created by Rembrandt throughout his life and considers the role of the Dutch master as the precursor of all modern painting.

Tiré du site Internet de JRP/Ringier: ""When encountering the strange objects (sculptures, drawings, installations) made by Urs Fischer (*1973)," writes the book's editor, Beatrix Ruf, "a waterfall of quickly triggered words, memories, comparisons, reproduced knowledge, and understanding is combined with speechlessness. It is as if an Internet search engine had generated a massive number of hits leading to technical and mental breakdown, confronting the user with a simultaneity of information, styles, facts, and possibilities that are at first unmanageable." The book has been conceived by the artist as a cross-referencing of his process-related and "styleless" work through the arrangement of more than 200 images: reproductions of works, installation views, studio shots, and special features. Using all possible ordinary materials, Fischer creates unhierarchical collages of objects and thoughts, high and low aesthetics, mundane and artistic memories, and personal and political interrogation. The publication has been designed by Scipio Schneider in collaboration with the artist, and laid out in printed form as a studio journal. Asked for a contribution, the London-based composer, engineer, and consultant Garrick Jones (*1965) wrote seven piano studies and a suite for strings and oboe inspired by Fischer's work. Taking up 200 pages of the book, these scores have been recorded, and the results are available on CD or as downloads on request from the publisher."

The heterogeneous punk spirit of Urs Fischer is in full threat in this catalogue from his recent retrospective exhibition (including many new works) at Kunsthaus Zrich. All materials were considered fair game, and Fischer took every possible liberty in the museum space. He cut huge walk-through holes in the gallery walls and leaned the removed pieces on their edges in the rooms. He made burning wax sculptures, put obstacles on the ground, and hung a DANGEr sign above it all. As curator Mirjam Varadinis says, "the familiarity of everyday motifs is undermined in a process of metamorphosis that renders [the work] uncanny and even threatening." Of course, a dose of humor, drawing upon the grotesque, informs the work as well. You can try to name influences, inspirations, and related artists--Thek, Nauman, Barney, Fischli & Weiss--but Fischer is sui generis.

New York-based artist Urs Fischer (born 1973 in Zurich) has devised a surreal universe in which dust bunnies are magnified into landscapes and a lump of clay squeezed in the artist's fist becomes a towering monolith. In this catalogue for Fischer's solo exhibition at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, a cast aluminum grave pierces the ceiling and the exhibition space becomes an excavation site. A gallery wallpapered with trompe l'oeil reproductions of collector Peter Brant's living room features artworks from his extensive private collection. Wax likenesses of Brant have been set alight and slowly melt away, dissolving into puddles. With these audacious formal investigations of scale and material, Fischer has produced an off-kilter installation that disconcerts and entrances.