urs fischer

urs fischer’s work moves between the everyday and the uncanny, combining a wide range of materials and processes—some traditional, others entirely experimental. his practice distorts scale, interrupts context, and reimagines familiar objects through technology and transformation. whether casting ephemeral materials in bronze or digitally merging faces in his problem paintings, fischer challenges how we perceive and categorize images. drawing on art historical references while pushing against their limits, his work embraces impermanence, contradiction, and collapse—inhabiting a space where the real and the imagined blur into one.

Marshaling a dizzying variety of materials and methods both established and unconventional, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation, distorting scale and reimagining common objects and images through technological intervention. By evoking and reworking historical genres and motifs, he embraces transformation and decay, producing art that inhabits a space between the real and the imagined. The Problem Paintings series represents a conscious flattening out and forcing together of disparate categories and associations, calling the status and relationship of each image’s components into question.

While earlier Problem Paintings foreground food and manufactured objects, the paintings on view in Paris feature enlarged vintage publicity headshots of popular film actors Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Gene Tierney, partially obscured by silkscreened images of flowers. The subjects’ eyes gleam with mystery, while the vibrant colors of the blooms reflect the women’s enigmatic hidden depths. Fischer’s witty clash of images summons the romantic and sexual associations of flowers while hinting at the ephemeral character of glamour and fame; it also evokes the mustache that Marcel Duchamp penciled onto a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. or La Joconde (1919).

The tense face-off between obfuscation and potential enacted by the works on view gives rise to the formal “problems” referenced in their collective title, while the masking of their subjects’ facial features hints at psychic and conceptual erasure. The blooms evoke floriography (the use of flowers as a coded poetic language), their pink, white, and blue colors echoing the symbolic colors of the Tricolore. And while their large scale suggests power and strength, they also serve as a metaphor for the women’s emergence into the sometimes harsh light of fame.