Madame Fisscher

Madame Fisscher, on view at Palazzo Grassi, offers a journey through Urs Fischer’s artistic career from the nineties to today. His work, characterized by humor, penchant for paradox, and virtuosity of execution, employs simultaneously an extraordinary diversity of media and materials. It calls into question the history of art and sculpture, our relationship to the body, the notion of time and the status of the object.

Urs Fischer’s art, which privileges polysemy and complexity, avoids any academic weightiness or univocal interpretation. With its combination of illusion and reality, violence and humor, his creative universe appears both logical and absurd. The artist creates unstable equilibriums, whose meaning seems to be constantly shifting. The exhibition’s title itself, “Madame Fisscher” (after the title of the work installed in the museum’s atrium), points to this rejection of a unique interpretation.

Does it refer to the artist, his companion, his mother, or perhaps to Madame Tussaud and her famous wax museum? Eliciting in turn – and sometimes simultaneously – surprise, doubt, puzzlement, and concern, the exhibition unfolds precisely in this logic of indetermination and movement.