Urs Fischer - ‘Scratch & Sniff’
12 September – 26 October 2024
Hiya it’s me. I’ve had a nice summer break. Galleryland was as blessedly quiet as your inbox for a while, but the art world is now back with a bang, with openings left, right and centre. First up for the new season of Unsubbed is Swiss artist Urs Fischer’s show at Sadie Coles. He and Sadie have a long term thing going on, and it’s his twelfth solo exhibition with her since 2003. It’s pretty good going in the heady realms of blue chip artists and galleries, which can be basically a bit like celebrity dating when it comes to sudden A-list break ups and re-couplings.
Urs Fischer is a big hitter. Bias alert here – I really like his work and he’s a lovely man too. I interviewed him back in 2017 for a previous show at Sadie Coles which involved a giant copy of Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ made out of white plasticine. He invited visitors to pick away at, reshape and effectively creatively destroy it, until bits of the sculpture ended up all over the walls and it sprouted all sorts of funky new growths.
It was a good example of the kind of trompe l’oeil, teasing tomfoolery that makes up a big part of his practice as an artist. Look at a sculpture of his that appears to be wet clay, and actually it’s brass. Check the streaks of paint on the canvas up close and they’ve been superimposed digitally. But it’s never just a one-note trick – there’s always something there which provides a weird and uncanny interplay between stable forms and very uneasy or unexpected associations. It’s also just really fun, playful and wonkily odd. And I think those are all good things.
But to Scratch & Sniff. These are paintings to get up close and personal with. They’re layered, bewilderingly complex canvases. There are human figures contained within, but fragmented and filtered through a total ephemera of visual information. He’s scraped off all the meat he can from Amazon pages, or the content of The Guardian or the New York Post on a particular day, and at times it’s like dealing with an explosion in a garage filled with newspapers and advertising catalogues.
Elsewhere there are photos of things Fischer has encountered on his bike rides around Los Angeles, like a glistening broken car light, which gets twisted and spun around in a maelstrom of mayhem. There’s actual paint on the paintings, but there are also weird impasto effects built up with a digital printing process, like one of those bumpy raised maps, but where the layers are all interspersed like a stage set. It’s totally deep, like, literally. But they are also paintings you need to stand back from and appreciate, and Fischer’s put sofas (leather and painted a kind of Margiela white) around the place to let you sit down and take them in.
There’s another trick of the eye located underfoot, which actually took me a second to twig. The apparently splotchy grey surface is a facsimile of his studio floor, which has been scanned and printed on vinyl and installed in the exhibition space. He’s done similar stuff with wallpaper before.
A significantly lovely thing about this show is the excellent free publication, a book/magazine of sorts, containing a random image diary mostly shot on his phone. It lives up to its name as it contains a hidden scratch ‘n’ sniff element which is disgustingly redolent for anyone who had a 90s childhood. And it also has a scratch off cover, which you can remove completely with a finger or a coin, or you can use as a canvas for your own lil artwork.
In the spirit of being a tease, I interviewed Urs about this show too, and that’s coming up very soon, so do watch those newly groaning back-to-school inboxes.
For now, go see the show, get the book, and have a scratch and a sniff.
