Urs Fischer (born May 2, 1973) is a Swiss-born contemporary visual artist living in New York City and Los Angeles. Fischer’s practice includes sculpture, installation, photography, and digitally-mediated images.
Fischer's current studio occupies a large warehouse in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, near the waterfront. He also has a studio in the Frogtown neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Early life and career
Born to two doctors as the second of two children in 1973, Fischer began his career in Switzerland where he studied photography at the Schule für Gestaltung, Zurich. After the basic, first-year course in art and design, he enrolled in the school's photography department, and supported himself by working as a bouncer at Zurich night clubs and house parties.
Fischer moved to Amsterdam in 1993, at the age of nineteen, and had his first solo show at a gallery in Zurich in 1996. He later lived in London, Los Angeles, and Berlin before moving to New York. In Berlin and New York, he shared studios with fellow artist Rudolf Stingel.
Style
Fischer works across sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, publishing, and digital art. The artist employs a variety of materials and processes in his work, including novel computation systems and artificial intelligence, resulting in an oeuvre that “resists easy classification”. His subversive, metaphysical approach to art is often considered to be influenced by anti-art movements like Neo-Dada, Lost Art, or the Situationist International. Since Fischer began showing his work in Europe in the mid-1990s, he has produced an enormous number of objects, drawings, collages, and room-size installations. Fischer has been described by the arts and culture magazine Vault as “internationally celebrated” and one of the most significant contemporary artists working today, with global sale prices reaching up to $6.8 million.
Recent work (2021–present)
CHAOS (Digital Sculptures / NFTs) Throughout his career, Fischer has used digital technology to mix repurposed images with generated images. In 2021, he fully explored digital sculpture for this first time with CHAOS, a series containing 1000 digitally-scanned and recreated everyday physical objects (like an egg and a lighter) paired to interact with each other.
Released as a series of 500 individual NFTs and culminating in a capstone piece, CHAOS #501, the project took over two years to complete and involved a global team of experts in 3D modeling, animation, and motion capture. Objects were chosen by Fischer because they were "engineered, cultured or manufactured by humans."
In April 2021, CHAOS #1–#500 launched to the public via online auctions on Fair Warning and Makers Place. CHAOS #1 sold for nearly $100,000 to an unknown buyer. In September 2022, CHAOS #501, the culmination of the series, was exhibited in the show "Denominator" at Gagosian in New York City on a state-of-the-art 14’ x 30’ micro LED wall display with .84 pixel pitch. The screen featured all 1000 digital objects interacting in a single space.
"Denominator" (Show) At the same show, Fischer unveiled two new pieces: People, a recreation of Room 43 of the National Gallery featuring replicas of paintings from artists like Van Gogh, with clips of cutout heads of YouTube video influencers projected over it. The installation was compared to “Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball series, where the viewer’s participation in the work becomes part of its image.” Denominator was a 12’ x 12’ cube of LED screens displaying algorithmically-generated video clips of TV commercials, stored in a new type of video database Fischer designed with software engineers.“The result is a strange fusion of images, showing time and value systems broken down by new modes of processing. Rather than building an interpretive structure for these images that explores their meaning and understanding by human cognition, Fischer instead lets the code do what it will, and allows new interpretations to emerge instead… It’s as if Fischer were asking what the meaning of an audience is in the modern era, and even, perhaps, if that audience needs to be human.”
UF (Clothing Line) In late 2022, Fischer launched his clothing line, UF, at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City.
Previous work (1996–2020)
1996–2000
In 1996, Fischer had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Walcheturm, Zurich. In 1999, he was selected to be an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation in London, alongside Keith Tyson, Mark Wallinger, and Sonia Boyce.
2001–2006
In 2002, Fischer had his first institutional show in the US at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which included an early wax sculpture, What Should an Owl Do with a Fork.