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Ensayo del lote
Spanning over ten feet in width, Telefunken (2005-2017) is a sprawling multi-media vision by Urs Fischer. Combining gesso, spray enamel, silkscreen and acrylic on top of aluminum composite panels, the artist entwines layers of abstract and figurative imagery, creating a mesmerizing interplay of colors, forms and half-told narratives. In the background, fragments of a domestic photograph emerge: kitchen shelves, packets of food, a box of bottled water and drawings on a fridge. On top, Fischer weaves a lattice of reflective cubic structures, some of which seem to refract and magnify elements of the background image like prisms. The entire spectacle is confounded by a further layer of disjointed images—a woman’s shoes and skirt are just visible—that migrate across the surface in hallucinogenic colors. Extending the legacy of Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke and others, Fischer’s hybrid works highlight the instability of image-making, combining perceptual distortions, illusory tricks and subversive humor through a combination of analogue and digital manipulation. Here, the original image below flickers and crackles like a lost signal: “Telefunken,” notably, is the name of a German radio and television apparatus company founded in 1903 that continues to produce audio products today.
Born in Switzerland in 1973, Fischer studied at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zürich. Coming to prominence in the 1990s, amid the heyday of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and other German Neo-Expressionists, he subsequently moved to New York, where he initially shared a studio with Rudolf Stingel. In 2004, he mounted his first major solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, and began work on Telefunken the following year. The work’s multi-media conceit is a reflection of Fischer’s wider practice, which encompasses sculpture, photography, drawing and painting, and employs materials as diverse as wax, taxidermy, lamps and loaves of bread. His paintings, he explains, aspire to the condition of three-dimensional experiences: indeed, the present work’s optical pyrotechnics seem to propel it away from the flat aluminum surface, its layers of illusion oscillating backwards and forwards within the viewer's vision. The quotidian photograph behind transcends its status as a static reproduction, transformed into a shifting, kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors.
While Telefunken might initially be seen to invoke the work of John Baldessari, David Salle and others who drew upon readymade imagery, Fischer is not inherently a conceptual artist. Where his predecessors began with ideas about how humans process pictures in the postmodern world, Fischer is more interested in the volatile potential of his materials. For him, image-making should be as contradictory, messy and inexplicable as human nature itself: “art is like people,” he explains. “You cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences, they are much more complex, much richer” (U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New York, New Museum, 2009, p. 62). By submitting to chaotic, unorthodox combinations of media and techniques, Fischer reveals the magic and mystery that lurk within the everyday experience. Here, the banal becomes the bewildering, reborn as an intoxicating, abstract enigma.
Born in Switzerland in 1973, Fischer studied at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zürich. Coming to prominence in the 1990s, amid the heyday of artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and other German Neo-Expressionists, he subsequently moved to New York, where he initially shared a studio with Rudolf Stingel. In 2004, he mounted his first major solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, and began work on Telefunken the following year. The work’s multi-media conceit is a reflection of Fischer’s wider practice, which encompasses sculpture, photography, drawing and painting, and employs materials as diverse as wax, taxidermy, lamps and loaves of bread. His paintings, he explains, aspire to the condition of three-dimensional experiences: indeed, the present work’s optical pyrotechnics seem to propel it away from the flat aluminum surface, its layers of illusion oscillating backwards and forwards within the viewer's vision. The quotidian photograph behind transcends its status as a static reproduction, transformed into a shifting, kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors.
While Telefunken might initially be seen to invoke the work of John Baldessari, David Salle and others who drew upon readymade imagery, Fischer is not inherently a conceptual artist. Where his predecessors began with ideas about how humans process pictures in the postmodern world, Fischer is more interested in the volatile potential of his materials. For him, image-making should be as contradictory, messy and inexplicable as human nature itself: “art is like people,” he explains. “You cannot reduce them to a couple of sentences, they are much more complex, much richer” (U. Fischer, quoted in interview with M. Gioni, in Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, exh. cat., New York, New Museum, 2009, p. 62). By submitting to chaotic, unorthodox combinations of media and techniques, Fischer reveals the magic and mystery that lurk within the everyday experience. Here, the banal becomes the bewildering, reborn as an intoxicating, abstract enigma.