Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher

In one of Spring 2012's most original and comprehensive projects, the François Pinault Foundation and Palazzo Grassi are holding the Madame Fisscher exhibition featuring Swiss artist Urs Fischer. As expressly requested by François Pinault, this exhibition inaugurates a cycle of monographic exhibitions that will give visitors an opportunity to become familiar with and further explore the work of artists of international standing present in the Foundation's collection.

The Fischer exhibition forms part of a structured cultural calendar that comprises a film cycle and the specific publication of two texts, both projects chosen and executed by Urs Fischer, as well as a workshop in collaboration with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia and a public encounter with the artist.

The more than 30 works on display are a mix of Pinault Foundation works and others loaned by leading international collectors. Chosen by the curator Caroline Bourgeois, this strategy confirms both Fischer's fame and success as a key artist on the contemporary art scene and the broad approach adopted by Palazzo Grassi's directors. The exhibition visitor route also features a "broad approach". Set in the centre of the building's large atrium is Fischer's seminal work, which inspired the title of the exhibition, Madame Fisscher (1999-2000). The installation is a scrupulous reproduction of Fischer's London studio and creatively and generatively "fans the flames" of the whole exhibition route.

As if in a sort of wunderkammer, but in this case showcasing different sculptural materials, visitors come into direct contact with the creative process of art, one that is never linear, orderly and aesthetically structured and, indeed, in Fischer's case, is tumultuous, often ironical, performative and totally fluid. The artist wants to draw visitors into the chaotic body of his artistic matter, and the little refined and clearly visible mechanisms of the electric dog in Keep it Going is a Private Thing (2001) convey the sense of the artistic creation process using movement and dynamism, here cleverly contrasted against the monumental inertia and brilliantly perfect form of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog, displayed opposite.

Madame Fisscher, the doubtful spelling of which remains intentionally unexplained, allows herself to be unveiled and stripped bare, offering a seductive vision. The walls of the installation are left open at the top, permitting extensive views of the interior with the other floors of the building looking down on it. This delightful exhibition design, only possible thanks to the great potential of Palazzo Grassi's architecture, unleashes a persuasive centripetal force that impacts on all the other works in the exhibition. The idea — the fluid thought behind the genesis of an artwork — is elevated by a hieratic and confusing characteristic of Fischer's work, suspended sculptures. From the difficult classical gesture of the thinker in Old Pain (2007), turned upside down and disjointed, to the dual ambiguity of heaviness and lightness perceived in works such as abC, The Lock (both 2007) and A Light Sigh Is The Sound Of My Life (2000-2001), his ubiquitous movement and fluctuation introduce one of the most remarkable paradigms of Fischer's poetic: the slow but inexorable passing of time.

Highly relevant, in this sense, are his Neon (2009) featuring the frank but transient presence of vegetables and the intimate dialogue with his friend and fellow artist Rudolph Stingel, conceived as a founding process of creative intervention and represented in Untitled (2012). Consisting in two wax statues being melted by candles lit inside them, the work causes us to question ourselves and doubt the very concept of the artwork's immanence; at the same time, we are seeing the manifestation of the selfsame precariousness and mutability that exists in each of us when we perceive the value of worldliness but also the manner and depth with which the passage of time influences space and the way it is structured. Fischer believes that this occurs via a constant and complex exchange of information, particularly through the human body. We see this in works such as Untitled (Holes) (2006), in which sculpture-orifices, again suspended, portray sexuality as a purely cognitive experience, and in the work specially conceived with Georg Herold entitled Necrophonia (2011) in which, as well as being a meditation on the relationship between naturalness and the exhibition of the body, reinforced by unfinished sculptures reminiscent of art studies, Fischer places the emphasis on the artwork's lifespan and on the different ways works interact with private and public spaces.

Fischer's focused gaze, sometimes with the added touch of Surrealist absurdity, also falls on a new and very personal reconsideration of the object's worth in a move that prompted Alison Gingeras to describe Fischer's work as "Pop Povera". An example of this is his Clouds (2002), in which the artist reworks the typically Impressionist topos of clouds in an ephemeral and ironical vision that rather than subtracting actually increases its symbolical appeal, and In Dubio Pro Reo (2007), in which extremely spare materials, a cabinet and a balancing chair, and their use, as if in a modest wood decollage, place Fischer's intention closer to that already seen in Joseph Beuys (see, too, another work in the exhibition, the Chair (Sewn) cycle of 1998-99). However, Fischer reveals bolder research in his appropriation of "objects", forcefully taking all his materials and components to the very limits of their form and symbolism in a personal transformation process. As the artist sees it, this operation also invests the space in which the objects "live", always triggering fascinating interaction and tending towards metamorphosis.

An example of a process of change worked by Fischer's own hands is his application and attractive use of materials. Be they polyurethane, epoxy resins, acrylic compounds or more common aluminium and plaster, Fischer manages to penetrate them and bring out a number of very different semantic levels and artistic references as, for instance, in Untitled (2010), in which a white plaster hand emerges over a real and fragile egg, in a delicate reference to classical imagery.

Through 15 July 2012
Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher
Palazzo Grassi
Campo San Samuele, Venice