Urs Fischer

New York, New Museum, Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty, October 2009 – February 2010

Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Urs Fischer, April - August 2013, pp. 131 and 415, illustrated in color (another example exhibited) 

“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 EXH. CAT., HOUSTON, TEXAS, BLAFFER GALLERY, URS FISCHER: MARY POPPINS, 2006, P. 36

Recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation, Urs Fischer possesses an incomparable ability to infuse poetry into everyday objects, as illustrated by 4:15PM & 4:15PM. Through his radical interventions, Fischer transforms ordinary domestic items into unexpected visions and with his original element of surprise redefines Duchamp’s conception of the readymade a century later. Notably included in Fischer’s acclaimed career survey held at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013, the present work epitomizes the conceptual sophistication and lively wit for which Fischer is renowned.

In the present work, two walking crutches stand suspended, ironically unsupported: traditionally given purpose by aiding a body in motion, at once holding and being held by a figure, here they become like figures of their own. Thus the crutches educe a commanding dialogue about the body, morphing and collapsing into themselves and each other through space, utter personifications of the state of bodily weakness they connote.