Urs Fischer's current show, Marguerite de Ponty, at the New Museum is the Swiss-born/New York-based artist's first major, solo U.S. museum exhibition. The exhibit is a collection of four year's of work by Fischer, occupying 3 floors of the museum presenting "a series of immersive installations and hallucinatory environments" (from the press release).
Starting from the top on the fourth floor, you are met by 5 massive, abstract, shiny aluminum sculptures that almost fill up the entire space. Frozen Pioneer (2009), David the Proprietor (2008-2009), lx (2006-2008), Zizi (2006-2008), and Marguerite de Ponty (2006-2008) were "cast from small clays, hand-molded by the artist" (from the exhibit's notes). In the center of the magnificent, silvery, mammoth sculptures, a life-sized, pink street lamp appears to be melting a la Dali.
Taking the south stairway down to the next level, you pass a nook displaying Neon (2009), "modified fluorescent light fixtures," on the ceiling, which instead of light bulbs cheekily hold a carrot, cucumber, and hot dog. The walls and ceiling of the third floor are completely covered in "wallpaper," or photographs the artist took of the entire architecture of this space - covering every inch with its corresponding photographic image creating a trompe l'oeil environment (Last Call Lascaux, 2009). Also on the third floor are a croissant suspended from a fishing wire with a tiny butterfly resting on it (Cumpadre, 2009); the infamous, life-like tongue that pokes out through a hole in the wall (Noisette, 2009); and Untitled (2009), a cast aluminum sculpture of a lavender-hued piano that appears to be melting or deflating in the center of the room.
The second floor (which you can only reach by the larger of the two elevators as security can only allow a certain number of visitors in at a time) houses Service à la française (2009), "Fischer’s most ambitious work to date." Using "more than 25,000 photographs and over twelve tons of steel" Fischer created over 50 large-scale, mirrored boxes that each feature four views or vantage points of various objects ranging from a variety of shoes, books, a guitar, a VHS tape of Love Streams, a Maxell cassette tape box, lighters, a deck of cards, buildings, a motorcycle helmet, a tube of lipstick, a British telephone booth, cardboard cutouts of a mummy and singer Ashanti, a bowl of Fruit Loops, a pear cut in half, a rotting pear, a slab of raw meat, a wedge of Swiss cheese, an eclair, a cupcake, a Dell CPU, an open box of matches from Ritz Paris, and much more. As the exhibit's press release states, the work as a whole is "[l]ike a collage unraveling before the viewer’s eyes, the surfaces of the boxes create an optical maze that renders everything simultaneously immaterial and hyperreal."
Overall, Marguerite de Ponty starts off with a bang on the fourth floor with the terrific aluminum sculptures, wanes a bit with the ironic pieces Neon, Last call Lascaux, and Cumpadre, and ends on a high note with the maze-like and almost trippy feel of Service à la française. Check out this fun, ambitious, and diverse show and judge for yourself. Learn more at newmuseum.org. Through February 7, 2010.
A pair of Urs Fischer's aluminum sculptures
Neon, 2009, Urs Fischer and Georg Herold
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