Urs Fischer

Private Collection, London (acquired directly from the artist)
Sadie Coles HQ, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 2011

London, Sadie Coles HQ, Urs Fischer, Elton John?, December 2004 - January 2005 (ed. no. 1/2)
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye, February - June 2005 (ed. no. 1/2)
London, Hayward Gallery; Moscow, Garage Center of Contemporary Culture, The New Décor, June 2010 - February 2011 (the present example)
Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Extended Loan, August 2011 - August 2014 (the present example)

Exh. Cat., Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Urs Fischer: Paris 1919, 2006, p. 12, illustrated (ed. no. 1/2)
Exh. Cat., New York, New Museum, Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, 2009, p. 341, illustrated in color (another example)

Please note the condition report for this lot will be available upon installation in our exhibition, opening May 8th.
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Exhibiting Urs Fischer’s wholly distinctive sense of whimsy and wonderment coupled with his extraordinary technical ingenuity, A Thing Called Gearbox from 2004 is a slyly conceptual exercise in Duchampian thought that epitomizes the artist’s ceaseless originality. Challenging reality and inspiring renewed curiosity in the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of the sculpture, Fischer magnifies and distorts the banality of everyday life with his distinctive élan. A cannon hovers weightlessly atop a string-like rod attached to a chair, seemingly frozen forever in a delicate balance of air and space. Citing art historical traditions ranging from the readymade, to the totemic polish of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space, to Koonsian fantasy, A Thing Called Gearbox confronts the viewer with a wildly inventive and archetypally rebellious reflection on the sociology of aesthetics within the landscape of twenty-first century modernity. Claudia Schmuckli noted the importance of normal, commonplace objects as key sources of inspiration for Fischer’s multi-faceted corpus: “The conflation of the generic and the specific is crucial for an understanding of Fischer’s oeuvre. So is the superimposition and layering of different realities and levels of experiences – all anchored in, and grounded by, the rules of the everyday as the ultimate personal point of reference.” (Claudia Schmuckli, "Just Push Play" in Exh. Cat., Houston, Blaffer Gallery, Urs Fischer: Mary Poppins, 2006, p. 36)

Fischer is one of the most innovative and pioneering artists working today; a creative maverick whose oeuvre has consistently transcended boundaries and challenged accepted artistic conventions. Combining humor with a visually and theoretically challenging creative concept, A Thing Called Gearbox reveals Urs Fischer’s astonishing ability to imbue quotidian objects with unexpected perspectives and ideas. Working in a dizzying range of media and styles, Fischer’s imagination has so far given rise to an extraordinary variety of installations, sculptures, photography, and painting, all of which share a subtle sense of mockery and an amusingly subversive wit. Figural portraits in wax that are allowed to slowly melt away, swinging light installations, and vibrating furniture are all examples of Fischer’s endlessly versatile technique. Everyday objects are appropriated and employed in wholly unexpected juxtapositions, causing the onlooker to question their response to the surrounding environment and further extending and interrogating the idea of the Duchampian ‘readymade’ as well as the Surrealist concept of the ‘found object’. Schmuckli highlighted the unique range of Fischer’s creative language: “Drawing freely from a multiplicity of sources without regard for tradition and hierarchy, his work effortlessly combines elements of high, mainstream, and underground cultures in a convincing demonstration of how irrelevant such categorizations have become. Fischer’s work, oscillating between rawness and tenderness, all-too-knowing experience and willful innocence, evokes an existence ruled by extremes that deftly balances humor and tragedy, delicacy and brutality, complexity and banality, to create poignant vignettes of everyday life.” (Claudia Schmuckli in Ibid., p. 36) Concurrently droll yet also sharply challenging in its elevation of a ‘basic’ object to the level of monumental public sculpture, the present work serves as a thought-provoking explication of Fischer’s utterly distinctive and highly diverse aesthetic dialectic.