Urs Fischer

In April 2013, Urs Fischer opened one of the most radical exhibitions ever presented in a museum. He arranged for tons of modeling clay to be delivered to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, installed a restaurant kitchen and a grand piano, and invited anyone who wanted to participate to sculpt the clay. Over 2,500 people created a staggering array of figures and forms. Fischer selected the most intriguing sculptures to cast in bronze. Fischer’s exhibition was one of the most impactful projects presented during Jeffrey Deitch’s tenure as MOCA Director. Now, thirteen years later, twenty-five of these bronzes are being presented in Deitch’s Orange Drive gallery. With a few exceptions, all of the exhibited sculptures were created by Fischer himself with his studio team.

Visitors to the gallery encounter a forest of figures and surreal structures. Many are like dream images, created with a directness and a strength of hand that is opposed to the slickness of academic sculpture. Each of the figures has a personality and seems to have an accompanying story.

In Deitch’s nearby gallery at the corner of N. Orange Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, Fischer shows his new LA Dust Paintings. This series also references an earlier exhibition that Deitch presented at MOCA, The Painting Factory, in 2012. Works from the original series of Dust Paintings from 2007-10 were installed at the entrance to the museum’s main exhibition gallery. Fischer had created only a small number of Dust Paintings and decided to revisit the concept with this new body of work. The paintings are hand painted on metal panels, some with scans of dust salvaged from his Los Angeles studio floor. They are reflective, evoking the colors of the sky. The exhibition is installed in a diagonal configuration representing day and night. Fischer sees the dust as mesoscopic, representing an intermediate state between the microscopic and the macroscopic of everyday visibility. Urs Fischer is one of the rare artists equally accomplished in painting and sculpture.

In addition to LA Dust, Fischer has transformed the gallery’s bookstore into a gallery of shadow lamp sculptures.

Urs Fischer, born Zurich 1973, has been living in Los Angeles part time and now full time since 2001. His remarkable exhibition of choreographed robot chairs, Play, was presented at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles in 2019. The Yes sculptures were shown at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco in 2017 and were documented in his book on the project, published in 2015.

The LA Dust paintings are presented in collaboration with Gagosian.