May 13-August 5, 2006

With a new body of work entitled Mary Poppins and created on site for his exhibition at Blaffer Gallery, Swiss artist Urs Fischer continues his tradition of violating established orders of reality through means both illusionistic and spatial that has brought him to the fore of the contemporary art world. A series of independent but interrelated sculptures are arranged in an installation that makes liberal use of the existing gallery space through architectural intervention and a theatrical mis-en-scene that are an integral part of the artist’s endeavor.

Mary Poppins is conceived around a series of digital collages that provide thematic and aesthetic clues to the content of the exhibition and that form the foundation from which a series of associated works and their installation arise. Each collage for Mary Poppins presents a unique combination of two or more seemingly contrasting but co-existing realities, juxtaposing photographic views of the artist’s domestic and work spaces with imagery drawn from mass media and popular culture. As disjunctive as his subjects and their combination may initially seem, they all have one thing in common: the superimposition and layering of different realities and levels of existence, all anchored in and grounded by the domestic as the ultimate personal point of reference. It is that sphere that Fischer departs from and ultimately returns to, but only after having taken us on a trip around the world and to the edges of reach of human imagination. A monumental bust of Einstein being hauled onto a bookshelf under the glow of a rainbow pictured in one of the collages serves as the most poignant reminder of the notion of relativity, which, in Fischer’s world, relates to the totality of human experience.

The conflation of the generic and the specific is crucial for an understanding of Fischer’s oeuvre. Allusions to popular legends and myths such as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Peter Pan, and Mary Poppins are ultimately excursions into parallel worlds of fantasy and magic. Here their relevance is two-fold: on the one hand they point to elements of a collective consciousness to be readily drawn upon; on the other hand they refer back to a historical and personal reality that defined their creation in the first place and that serves as a reminder that these stories, although having entered the realm of the universal, are still products of individual experiences in an attempt to exceed everyday reality through the power of imagination.

It is this infusion of the ordinary with the extraordinary–the magical as well as the uncanny–that Fischer relates to and that is also at the core of his artistic enterprise. He leads us from childhood magic to adult sci-fi fantasies, takes us to the late nineteenth-century and back to the present time, from rural Switzerland to the first modern theme park, the Crystal Palace, to modern day Disney World extravaganzas. However, as concrete a motif as he may offer us by creating images of all too familiar things, they only function as suggestions for potential interpretation. His installations of drawings, paintings and sculptures offer open-ended narrative propositions with infinite possibilities.

Fischer describes a world in constant flux and metamorphosis, one in which materials may develop a life of their own, exhibitions take shape in situ, and a sense of time passing is prevalent. His work is characterized by an open and fluid approach to materials and a disregard for practical limitations. Organic and synthetic materials commingle freely in sculptures and installations where entropy is integral to the work and mutation is the key. In his emphasis on process and transformation, Fischer creates exhibitions that are very much alive. Presenting the viewer with continuously changing scenarios, he consciously plays with and demystifies the mythical notion of an artistic studio practice resulting in finite objects of ultimate authority. While often referring to classic art historical genres and motifs, such as still life, portrait, and history painting, he engages the idealism and romanticism attached to these traditions, only to undercut them with a subversive sense of humor. Drawing freely from a multiplicity of sources without regard for tradition and hierarchy, his oeuvre effortlessly combines elements of high, mainstream, and subcultures, in an effective demonstration of how irrelevant such categorizations have become. The raw energy and punk spirit that informs his work evokes an existence ruled by extremes and deftly balances humor and tragedy, delicacy and brutality, complexity and banality to create poignant vignettes of everyday life.

Urs Fischer: Mary Poppins is made possible, in part, by Houston Endowment Inc., and The Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation.