Urs Fischer Makes Salon 94 His Material Playground
An expansive show surveys the artist's witty and wonderful approach to creating, from experimental prototypes to finished design objects
“Shucks & Aww,” Urs Fischer’s first solo exhibition with Salon 94, turns the gallery’s first two floors into a split-screen of his mind. The Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based artist is known for an unpredictable, materially omnivorous practice that restlessly moves between sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and even clothing. Here, he stages sculpture and design as two separate realms, only to show how porous that border really is.
Downstairs, the chairs eschew function. One dangles from the ceiling, sliced in two. Another looks disturbingly handmade, perhaps evoking the horror-craft aesthetic of Ed Gein’s human skin furniture. In a side room, a pink acrylic coffee table stands on legs made of bronze-cast everyday objects, while kookily painted internet ads toy with the banner-ad look, nodding to the deadpan style of Richard Prince.
This floor, Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn explains, houses “the most ‘unfinished’ rooms—the audience experiences the rawness and single hand of his private studio, experimenting with found objects, his cat for company, fruit kept in an abandoned toilet—his ‘shucks.’” Here, the furniture doesn’t quite operate as furniture should. It invites a perch or a lean, then makes the impulse feel wrong. Staying stubbornly sculptural, the pieces insist on being looked at rather than used, which makes upstairs’ shift feel all the more sharp.
Here, the focus returns to function. Chairs, lamps, mirrors, and rugs become resolutely usable, as though Fischer, after years of mocking, finally allowed purpose through the door. “This is our tonier exhibition space,” explains Greenberg Rohatyn, where “we see the magic results of having refined his ideas from below, collaborating with the best artisans—his luxury and fabrication. A wizard—his ‘awe’ made more clear and magical.”
A luxurious chair, perhaps cast in bronze but painted to resemble plastic, invites weight. Fischer riffs on the 1912 townhouse’s architecture with his own versions of a Tiffany lamp and a Giacometti light, one melting mid-glow. The carpet, meanwhile, replicates the paint-splattered floor of his Los Angeles studio. In the stone room, Elegy—a cascade of 800 hand-blown, mirrored glass drops—quietly re-centers the sculpture that is fundamental to Fisher’s practice within the mix. On a mushroom-like table nearby, small gilded objects titled Five Easy Pieces gleam like jewelry but act like fidget toys, underscoring the artist’s ongoing game of perception and material truth.
Thereby, the show’s title clicks into place. “Shucks” is the downstairs: tests, raw ideas, near-objects. The upstairs “Aww” leverages craftsmanship to refine those ideas into objects that behave. Together, they demonstrate how use can sharpen an artwork’s meaning—and how the line between art and furniture is thinner than it initially appears.
“Shucks & Aww” is on view at Salon 94 Design at 3 E 89th St, New York, NY, through December 20th.