This exhibition, the gallery’s twelfth solo show with Urs Fischer since first working together in 2003, is a compendium of the artist’s experiments in painting and installation. The paintings in Scratch and Sniff present an accumulative exercise in the physical building of images, engaging different applications of painting, photography and ink-jet printing layered together to create heightened spatial dimension. The images they conjure or appropriate (as both simultaneously occur within each painting) can be figurative or fragmented: there are oblique portraits, pop compilations and abstracted landscapes. Like a theatre of flat stage sets, each is built from front to back or from back to front: they float between flatness and depth, alternating physical gesture and on-screen experience.
One of the paintings, Meditations (2024), captures a screengrab of an Amazon search for books on politics today. This digital skin, hovering above the painted background presents as a kind of flag, reflecting the anxiety of our time in loud, enhanced, powered-up colour. Within the context of impatient contemporary living, this work – and the overall busy experience of the exhibition environment – reflects our urgent computation of the mass of visual images we are invited, or forced, to consume every day. Figures and faces emerge in profile or as modern master busts in an amalgamation of human experience and personal history.
The floor of the gallery is laid in vinyl printed with an image of Fischer’s LA studio flooring – paint splattered and smeared, the traces of ink and carpet are collaged into a randomised version of the layering and variation in the controlled paintings on the gallery walls. Scratch and Sniff places the viewer within the studio in energised real time, alluding to previous wallpaper installations that reconfigured artworks in an alternative physical reality. In Fischer’s 2009 Marguerite de Ponty exhibition at the New Museum, New York, the artist photographed and reprinted every inch of the building’s architecture, reworking it to create a wallpaper that covered the same ceiling and walls, playing with the fundamentals of art and space to form a maddening simulation. In this new display, Fischer returns his audience’s attention to the art-making process, chronologising the development of his practice by bringing together printing, gestured painting, photography, collage and further experimental techniques to create an entirely new body of work and experience of the gallery space while the floor emulates the very place such works and ideas were conceived. Presented in this way, linking image to process and to the artist’s history, allows for nostalgia about the development of picture-making at specific moments in Fischer’s practice, also reflected in a new book of his latest paintings.
Urs Fischer Scratch and Sniff, 12th September – 26th October 2024, Sadie Coles HQ Kingly Street
Private view: Thursday 12 September, 6-8pm
Fischer offers Scratch and Sniff, a free book for the exhibition, in which a cacophony of gesture and image are printed in scratch-off form, extending his invitation to participate and play beyond the gallery space.
Urs Fischer (b. Switzerland, 1973) lives in New York. Recent major exhibitions include Flea Circus, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); PLAY, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2022); Lovers, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2022); The Intelligence of Nature, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); Bourse de Commence: Pinault Collection, Paris (2021); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2020); ERROR, The Brant Foundation, Greenwich (2019); soft, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2018); Big Clay #4 and Two Tuscan Men, Piazza della Signoria, Florence (2017); The Public & the Private, Legion of Honor, San Francisco (2017); The Kiss, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2017); Small Axe, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); MOCA, Los Angeles (2013); Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012); and Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Day for Night: New American Realism, National Gallery of Ancient Art, Rome (2024); JANUS, Palazzo Diedo, Berggruen Arts & Culture, Venice (2024); SHINE ON, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); REPEATER, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2022); The Tenth Anniversary, ARTFLYER, Athens (2021); Anti-Structure, Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens (2021); The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); Nature of Robotics: An Expanded Field, EPFL ArtLab École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (2021); Vampiros: La evolución del mito (Vampires: The Evolution of the Myth), CaixaForum Barcelona, Fundació Bancària “la Caixa” (2020); Amuse-Bouche: The Taste of Art, Museum Tinguely, Basel (2020); and La rivoluzione siamo noi. Collezionismo italiano contemporaneo, XNL Piacenza Contemporeana (2020). In 2022, a major permanent public commission, entitled L’arc, was unveiled at Station F in Paris.
