Now Showing | Urs Fischer

Culture

By TRINIE DALTON

April 23, 2013, 11:15 am

The artist Urs Fischer may humbly refer to his ambitious exhibition occupying 65,000 square feet of Los Angeles MOCA’s two venues as “pretty much a sculpture show,” but it’s more than that. Fischer and Jessica Morgan, the Tate Modern’s curator, have designed a stunning visual presentation collecting more than 10 years of Fischer’s artworks into a formal exercise in high contrasts — order built from disarray, precision from destruction — presented through radical scale shifts, disharmonious color schemes and surprisingly cohesive textural oppositions.

The exhibition showcases many of Fischer’s canonical works, like “Untitled (Soft Bed),” a cast aluminum bed that’s sagging and collapsed but as sublime as an L.A. sunset with its pale paint striations, and “Untitled (Bread House),” a witchy hut made from crusty baguette logs. These more surreal stand-alone representational works, whose narrative whimsies are reinforced by surrounding sculptures depicting lazy skeletons, overgrown fried eggs and cheese blocks, are perfectly undermined by cavelike holes Fischer has cut in the museum walls, and the dirty black brushwork with which he’s disheveled the pristine floors. “A lot of artists I like create a very specific order,” Fischer says. “I would like to be an artist like that. Most art is about structure or order, just like our lives have order.” He adds that despite that admiration, “somehow disorder is not unnatural to me. It’s more natural.”

The exhibition is designed to oscillate between, as Fischer says, “things made straight from the real objects: a horse, a bed, wallpaper, scanned or processed, not handmade,” and artworks that “start with digital data, then go artisanal.”

Case in point: colonizing the Geffen space is a massive site-specific collaborative clay sculpture project made by 1,500 participants over four weeks. Here, a series of dusty, labyrinthine trails meander through clumpy, dioramic universes stacked with rough-hewn objects ranging from psychedelic abstractions to more figurative and cartoonish pieces: sand castles, igloos, hearths, gnomes, tree stumps. Aesthetically, this wonderland serves as an elaborate botanical garden for three previously made giant wax candle sculptures, prefaced outside by a gargantuan “scholar’s rock” installed in the museum’s parking lot, which Fischer scaled up from a palm-held piece of clay into a hotel-size monument. Fischer calls this effort “my biggest collaboration yet: free, fearless, instant fun and very direct. And inclusive as a way to subvert museum exclusivity.”

So is this a retrospective, as it’s been labeled? “It depends on what kind,” Fischer says. “It’s based on atmosphere rather than on an academic run-through. I wanted to find a way to deal with old work as well as the new without being aggressive about trying to change what it all is.”

“Urs Fischer” is on view through Aug. 19 at MOCA Grand Avenue and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA; moca.org.