Urs Fischer: Battito di Ciglia

Urs Fischer – who returns to Milan following his last show at Massimo De Carlo in 2006, where he exhibited alongside his close friend Rudolf Stingel, and his successful 2005 exhibition Jet Set Lady organized by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi—will be the first artist to exhibit in Massimo De Carlo’s two spaces: at the recently inaugurated space at Palazzo Belgioioso and in the gallery’s headquarters on Via Ventura.

Shifting between the familiar and the unknown, Urs Fischer’s world is populated by sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings that construct an infinite anthology of mutations. With wit and an often-dark sense of humour, Fischer’s work provokes and evokes, playing with archetypes through the radical transformation of materials.

From his earlier works such as the halved apple and pear joined together with a screw (2000) to his iconic “Bread House” (2004-05), a chalet made entirely of bread loaves that has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York and at the Istituto dei Ciechi in Milan, Fischer has worked on different scales and with different materials, organic and non, investigating the notion and process of alteration.

In 2015 he installed a massive clay-inspired sinuous aluminium sculpture, 13 meters tall, in front of the Seagram Building in New York. As with his recent retrospective Faux Friends at Geneva’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Fischer’s dazzling creations are made of variable sizes, from large to small scale, and in turns of long-lasting and non-durable material: wax, clay, aluminium, rubber, and food all become part of a quest to grasp an anachronistic sense of decay, ephemerality, and resilience.