PARIS.- Gagosian is now showing Beauty, an exhibition of new works from Urs Fischer’s series Problem Paintings (2010–) at the gallery’s rue de Castiglione location, opening today. The exhibition follows the fall 2023 presentation of Fischer’s public sculpture Wave (2018) at Place Vendôme, and the coincident display of his painting Candyfloss (2023) in the street-facing vitrine at Gagosian’s rue de Ponthieu gallery.
Marshaling a dizzying variety of materials and methods both established and unconventional, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation, distorting scale and reimagining common objects and images through technological intervention. By evoking and reworking historical genres and motifs, he embraces transformation and decay, producing art that inhabits a space between the real and the imagined. The Problem Paintings series represents a conscious flattening out and forcing together of disparate categories and associations, calling the status and relationship of each image’s components into question.
While earlier Problem Paintings foreground food and manufactured objects, the paintings on view in Paris feature enlarged vintage publicity headshots of popular film actors Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Gene Tierney, partially obscured by silkscreened images of flowers. The subjects’ eyes gleam with mystery, while the vibrant colors of the blooms reflect the women’s enigmatic hidden depths. Fischer’s witty clash of images summons the romantic and sexual associations of flowers while hinting at the ephemeral character of glamour and fame; it also evokes the mustache that Marcel Duchamp penciled onto a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. or La Joconde (1919).
The tense face-off between obfuscation and potential enacted by the works on view gives rise to the formal “problems” referenced in their collective title, while the masking of their subjects’ facial features hints at psychic and conceptual erasure. The blooms evoke floriography (the use of flowers as a coded poetic language), their pink, white, and blue colors echoing the symbolic colors of the Tricolore. And while their large scale suggests power and strength, they also serve as a metaphor for the women’s emergence into the sometimes harsh light of fame.
Urs Fischer was born in Zurich and lives and works in New York. Collections include Fondation Carmignac, Paris; FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, France; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; Kunstmuseum Basel; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museo d’arte della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum, New York (2009–10); 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011); Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2012); Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2013); YES, DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece (2013); Small Axe, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2013); Mon cher..., Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France (2016); The Public & the Private, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2017); The Lyrical and the Prosaic, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2019–20); Lovers, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2022); and PLAY, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2022).
Gagosian
Urs Fischer: Beauty
March 5–May 25, 2024
