Amelia’s Magazine | Urs Fischer: Molding Objects to Imperfection

6All Photographs courtesy of New Museum, viagra buy except where otherwise stated

It is now time for the absurd to take center stage. Swiss-born “imperfectionist” Urs Ficher makes the gallery goer rethink his or her own reality and I am grateful to the New Museum for introducing me to this brilliant artist. Ficher is an artist renown for his non-traditional creations. Thinking the world as a populated center of objects that interact and create an artificial reality, his aim is to call the viewer’s attention to his singular inner realm; his interpretations of what this life is are conveyed through different types of installations. New productions and iconic works are aplenty and together compose a series of gigantic still life and walk-in tableaux choreographed entirely by the artist. I find myself exploring neither a traditional survey nor a retrospective but the culmination of four years of work. These new productions reveal the true scope of Fischer’s universe and I am enthralled by what I am discovering.

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Above photograph courtesy of Vanesa Krongold

Fischer has taken over all the three floors of the museum. Illusion and reality are intertwined in the artist ‘s show thanks to a game of trading places and multiple reflections. Chrome boxes are arranged in a grid of monoliths that create a cityscape of mirrored cubes onto which the artist has silk screened a dizzying array of images. I think it’s perfect; It’s just how I’ve been feeling when walking about New York city – drunk from trying to take it all in! It is very interesting how the artist plays with bi dimensions; I am strangely attracted by some disregarded toys. Its all about combining the reality through dimensions, perspectives, and collage. The viewer is thrust into an uneasy place, trying to understand how to walk in this new world. The hyper real state of the objects are meant to represent your and my reality…

72009 Plaster, paint, bread 10 x 21 x 15 cm.

Urs Fischer presents an installation that turns the Museum’s architecture into an image of itself—a site-specific trompe l’oeil environment. In a maddening reproduction exercise, each square inch of the Museum architecture has been photographed and reprinted as a wallpaper that covers these very same walls and ceiling it is meant to portray. A piano occupies the room, appearing to melt under the pressure of some invisible force. Simultaneously solid and soft like a Salvador Dalí painting in three dimensions, this sculpture seems to succumb to a dramatic process of metamorphosis.

8Marguerite de Ponty.

On the fourth floor, Fischer presents five new aluminum sculptures cast from small clays and hand-molded by the artist. Hanging from the ceiling or balancing awkwardly in space, these massive abstractions resemble strange cocoons or a gathering of enigmatic monuments. Fischer is an engineer of imaginary worlds who has in the past created sculptures in a rich variety of materials, including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them.

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In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space. Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a Neo-Baroque sense for the absurd. And I am glad a taste of it!

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The exhibition Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty is ending on February the 7th, 2010. The New Museum is a modern building located in 235 Bowery Street, New-York.

Categories ,Absurd, ,Aluminium, ,art, ,Art space, ,baroque, ,Clay, ,contemporary art, ,Exhibition Review, ,Hand molded, ,installation, ,Material, ,New Museum, ,new york, ,organic, ,review, ,Salvator Dali, ,sculpture, ,Still Life, ,surrealism, ,toy, ,Urs Fischer

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Amelia’s Magazine | A Review of ILLUMinations at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale 2011: part two

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Nicholas Hlobo
Here’s my second half of a round up of the best art that I found at the ILLUMinations exhibition at the Arsenale, more about part of the 54th Venice Biennale.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Nicholas Hlobo
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Nicholas Hlobo
Nicholas Hlobo‘s massive Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela skull, more about rubber, viagra approved tyre, leather and ribbon installation was one of my favourite pieces at the Arsenale. This vast sculpture refers to South African myths and in particular the vampire bird of Xhosa folk songs. Spooky, enigmatic and affecting.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Mariana Castillo Deball
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Mariana Castillo Deball
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Mariana Castillo Deball
I also really liked the work of Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball. Having studied ancient Aztec manuscripts, she has reproduced her interpretation in the form of a long script, re-imagining their long lost meanings.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Fabian Marti
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Fabian Marti
Fabian Marti has built a huge structure from boxes of plywood, stacked with curiously relaxed ceramic incense holders. Visitors enter a cave inside to witness a trance like video of the sun shining through trees in India. Sun Oh! was inspired by Brion Gysin‘s experimental hallucinations brought on by light flickering through trees.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Urs Fischer
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Urs Fischer
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Urs Fischer
We were all captivated by Urs Fischer‘s Untitled – a huge wax installation which has been slowly burning to the ground as the Biennale progresses. The decapitated head of a man lies on the floor at the foot of a disintegrating chair – a truly grotesque vision that is also curiously humorous.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Corinne Wasmuht
Corinne Wasmuht paints huge pieces that straddle the worlds of reality and fiction. Her pixelated artwork Bibliotheque CDG BSL offers a dreamlike experience to viewers, who recognise in its blinding colours the brightness of a digital screen.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-josh smith
Josh Smith displays a huge collage of artwork that would not look out of place pasted on to a wall on a side street off Brick Lane.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Giulia Piscitelli
Giulia Piscitelli‘s long skeins of iridescent silk, Spica (2011), are painted with bleach to create intricate bone like patterns. Beautiful – and perfect for a corporate environment.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Klara Liden
Klara Liden has made an installation of garbage cans, which are hung against artfully peeling brick walls. By displaying the most banal of street furniture as art she aims to make viewers question their aesthetic tastes.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Monica Bonvicini
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Monica Bonvicini
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Monica Bonvicini
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Monica Bonvicini
The final room of this section presents the work of Monica Bonvicini, who has been very vocal about what she thinks of the circus that is the Biennale and in fact the art world in general. She only agreed to be involved in this years show if she could make an installation that questioned the vacuousness of it all. Thus her huge room is dominated with a series of staircases to nowhere. Suitably powerful and dramatic.

Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Arsenale
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Arsenale
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Arsenale
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-Arsenale
Venice Biennale 2011 Swatch review-The Geppetto Pavilion
Outside Loris Gréaud has planted a life size replica of a beached whale, which lies gasping on a pile of sand. The Geppetto Pavilion takes its name from the story of Pinocchio, who is swallowed by Monstro the whale. It is a strange and unlikely thing to encounter amongst the cranes and docks of the old Arsenale.

The Venice Biennale continues until the 27th November 2011. Don’t forget to look at part one of my review.

Categories ,Arsenale, ,Aztec, ,Bibliotheque CDG BSL, ,Brion Gysin, ,collage, ,Corinne Wasmuht, ,digital, ,Fabian Marti, ,Giulia Piscitelli, ,Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela, ,ILLUMinations, ,India, ,Josh Smith, ,Klara Liden, ,Mariana Castillo Deball, ,Mexican, ,Monica Bonvicini, ,Monstro, ,Nicholas Hlobo, ,Pinocchio, ,South African, ,Spica (2011), ,Sun Oh!, ,The Geppetto Pavilion, ,Untitled, ,Urs Fischer, ,Venice Biennale, ,Xhosa

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