Kir Royal

Fully illustrated monograph

If Mirjam Varadinis recalls the different (and sometimes contradictory) traditions at the heart of Fischer’s practice, she also analyzes the strategies he uses to engage with viewers: “the exhibition Kir Royal is designed as a mental landscape with an impressive but disturbing visual impact, disturbing because the familiarity of everyday motifs is undermined in a process of metamorphosis that renders them uncanny and even threatening. One cannot, nor does the artist let us, escape the sense of unease that his works provoke. Shades of Bruce Nauman come to mind, and his idea of ‘an art that puts you on an edge; that forces you into a heightened awareness of yourself and the situation.’ Urs Fischer’s works are not likely to induce anxiety because they always contain a generous smattering of humor, but they do expose viewers to unexpected experiences.”

Trained as a photographer, Urs Fischer (*1973, Zurich) works primarily in the traditional media of drawing, sculpture, and painting. He has recently held solo shows at the ICA in London (2000), the Stedeljik Bureau in Amsterdam (2000), the Kunsthaus Glarus (2000), and the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2003). He exhibits regularly at Galerie Presenhuber in Zurich, Sadie Coles HQ in London, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. In 2004 he had a solo exhibition at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris.

Published in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich on the occasion of Urs Fischer’s solo exhibition.

By the same artist: Good Smell. Make-up Tree (Monographs & Artists’ Books, 2004)