Urs Fischer

Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

Texas, Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston, Mary Poppins, 2006

Exhibition Catalogue, New York, New Museum, Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, 2009-10, pp. 252-3, illustrated in installation in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the image fails to convey the metallic quality of the silver paint and kinetic rocking movement of the work. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition, with all moving parts functioning correctly.
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Recognised as one of the most influential artists of his generation, Urs Fischer possesses an incomparable ability to infuse poetry into everyday objects as presently illustrated by Chagall, executed in 2006. 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 monographic exhibition Mary Poppins held at the Blaffer Gallery, Houston, in 2006, the present work epitomises the conceptual sophistication and lively wit for which Fischer is renowned.

Upon first sight, Chagall is a model of stability. A life-size ladder supports a wooden plank, which bears the weight of a shipping box. Like the child’s first successful structure created from toy blocks, it is an essay in basic design. Yet Chagall is not the ordinary object it seems, just as the magical Mary Poppins was not a typical Edwardian nanny. Each piece of the sculpture is carved from polyurethane, rendering it functionally useless; moreover, a motorized propeller underneath the plank causes the entire piece to shake and bounce off of springs affixed under its feet. What previously illustrated the basic laws of physics now takes poetic, humorous joy from them. Reconfiguring banal and everyday props is for Fischer an expression of the artist’s prophetical capacity to reveal truth. According to Fischer: “[t]he present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. […] It’s always been the artist who perceive the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it” (the artist quoted in: Georg Herold, ‘Urs Fischer’, The Journal, no. 28, pp. 84-97).

In this context, the reference to Marc Chagall married with a ladder is illuminated, Chagall’s paintings often depicting the mystical Jacob’s Ladder extending toward heaven as a symbol of transcendence and heightened spiritual awareness. Playfully overturning any religious pretensions, Fischer yet retains the implication of enlightenment, reminding the audience of the artist’s ability to sublimate ancient myths and modern ephemera alike in the creation of powerful contemporary artistic narratives.