This post only has at heart your getting lost. If you recognize the Frost poem from which the previous sentence derives, read it, and then, tomorrow, at 6 p.m., go see the exhibition of objects by Urs Fischer and paintings by Cassandra MacLeod at Gavin Brown.
About Mr. Fischer’s work, we’d rather not give much away. Nothing we could write here would suffice to capture the kaleidoscopic quality of what’s on offer at the gallery. We could talk about a profusion of images trapped under layers of lacquer. We could talk about tables. We could talk about a table made as a gift for Jeffrey Deitch that features an image of van Gogh’s grave. We could talk about the smiling mugs of plastic surgeons, the smiling mugs of realtors, the smiling mugs of art dealers, the smiling mugs of artists.
We could talk about how plastic surgeons are sculptors of skin as Urs Fischer is a sculptor of wax. We could talk about the face of an art dealer as a puckered, mottled slab of prosciutto into which has been stuck a set of yellowed dentures.
We could talk about a stuffed elephant, or a water cooler that inadvertently mimics an Easter Island figure. We could talk about a man doing yoga who turned into a snail, about a gaping mouth, about Abstract Expressionism by ejaculation.
The spirit of this show is as generous as that of his 2007 outing at Brown, where he ripped out the floor of the shop, and invited you to walk around in that cavernous hole, like an adventurer, and called it You. You are the subject once again, you are the explorer, you are set loose in a kind of vortex of images, you are left to make sense of it all. If you had one of the pieces in the show that opens tomorrow, you could put things on it and change it.
what?
This post offers nothing. I have no idea what you are even writing about.
“If you had one of the pieces in the show that opens tomorrow, you could put things on it and change it.”
You mean, like, a table cloth?
[...] About Mr. Fischer’s work, we’d rather not give much away. Nothing we could write here would suffice to capture the kaleidoscopic quality of what’s on offer at the gallery. We could talk about a profusion of images trapped under layers of lacquer. We could talk about tables. We could talk about a table made as a gift for Jeffrey Deitch that features an image of van Gogh’s grave. We could talk about the smiling mugs of plastic surgeons, the smiling mugs of realtors, the smiling mugs of art dealers, the smiling mugs of artists. Read More [...]
Yes, it’s a bit odd-sounding maybe because it was purposely ambiguous, an attempt not to give too much away in advance of the exhibition’s opening. Now that it has opened, it probably makes sense to add that Urs Fischer’s artworks in it are a group of tables, each one screenprinted with a variety of images, and covered with lacquer such that they are entirely functional as tables. The tables fill the gallery, and you have to navigate around them in narrow aisles; some of them are stacked on top of one another. Whoever owns one could place objects on it, altering the composition of images on its surface. One of the more clever tables, in this regard, shows the cluttered surface of the artist’s desk, complete with computer, papers, etc. It’s more than a clever bit of trompe l’oeil though. If you happen to be in New York, the whole show is well worth seeing.