Library: Urs Fischer

Library

This library selection features the artist Urs Fischer, whose exhibition ERROR is currently on view at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, CT. Please click the link below to plan your visit!

Urs Fischer: Error Exhibition Page

About The Brant Foundation Library

The Brant Foundation’s library program was established in 2009 to facilitate the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art and to advance our mission of promoting arts education. As both a museum and art study center, the Foundation’s library serves as a crucial resource for students, scholars, and educators by providing access to a unique collection of hard-to-find materials. After noticing the difficulties of obtaining contemporary art publications, typically as a result of rarity or expense, the Foundation was inspired to make efforts to broaden their holdings and increase accessibility to the public.

By reaching out to the surrounding arts community for help, the Foundation has accumulated an actively growing, rich collection of contemporary art books. With the contributions from the many organizations and institutions that share our vision, the public gains access to a wider range of materials used for the scholarly study and examination of contemporary art. Housing over 1,000 volumes – from exhibition catalogs and artist monographs to art criticism texts and periodicals – the library reflects the Foundation’s collection and admiration of contemporary art. Because of the rarity and value of the materials, our library is non-circulating, but we welcome and encourage the public to make use of the study center during operating hours. Please contact info@brantfoundation.org to make an appointment to visit The Brant Foundation’s library.

Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer provides an overview of the Swiss artist’s heterogeneous oeuvre and features many of his best-known works. Designed and conceived by Fischer, the book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, with clusters of works that allow the reader to observe how Fischer has explored disparate formal strategies to engage with his multifarious interests–which include gravity, architecture, shadows, representation, destruction, entropy and time–and revisit favorite motifs, such as furniture, fruit, animals, skeletons and other surrogates for his cardinal subject, the human body, over the past decade and a half. Produced for his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, this hefty volume includes essays by Jessica Morgan and Ulrich Lehmann that unpack the dominant thematics in Fischer’s work and examine the significance of the materials and production techniques in his sculptural practice.

Urs Fischer: Bruno & Yoyo

Essay by Joachim Pissarro; co-published with Vito Schnabel Gallery

Bruno & Yoyo documents the inaugural exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery in St. Moritz, Switzerland, which centers around Urs Fischer’s eponymous sculpture of gallerist and art collector Bruno Bischofberger and his wife Yoyo. Cast in wax with wicks, the psychedelically colored life-size sculpture functions as a candle that melts down over the course of the exhibition. The book features an essay by Joachim Pissarro that delves into the social networks that tie the artist, his subjects, and the gallerist together as well as explores the history of wax sculptures and recurring themes within Fischer’s work.

Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole

Essays by Bice Curiger and Jessica Morgan; interview by Massimiliano Gioni.

In a move that now seems prescient, Swiss artist Urs Fischer—who was born in 1973—literally pulled the floor out from under viewers for a 2007 exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, by digging through the gallery foundations and exposing the dirt and rubble beneath. Best known for this kind of dramatic transfiguration of the exhibition space, as well as for his unexpected transformations of quotidian objects and his lack of allegiance to any one style, Fischer consistently projects a sense of transience and existential uncertainty. This volume—which includes newly commissioned essays by Massimiliano Gioni and Jessica Morgan, as well as over 200 images of Fischer’s work, including installation views and studio shots—functions like a search engine, cross-referencing Fischer’s thought processes. Published concurrently with his solo exhibition at New York’s New Museum, it was conceived by designer Scipio Schneider in close collaboration with the artist.

Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher

Introduction by Caroline Bourgeois; essays by Patricia Falguières and Michele Robecchi
(English/French/Italian)

Bringing together more than 30 works spanning almost two decades of genre-crossing production, Madame Fisscher, produced on the occasion of Urs Fischer’s 2012 solo exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, presents an overview of the artist’s work from the late 1990s to the present. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois, the show centers on an eponymously titled installation that stages the creative process by reconstituting the artist’s former studio within the exhibition space.

Urs Fischer: Skinny Sunrise

Interview by Gerald Matt (German/English)

Documenting Urs Fischer’s 2012 solo exhibition of the same title at the Kunsthalle Wien, Skinny Sunrise presents a survey of the artist’s oeuvre from the late 1990s through today, curated by Gerald Matt and Angela Stief. Among the new sculptures produced for this exhibition is Fischer’s first candle self-portrait, which is set alight and slowly burns down before our eyes, its form continually in flux, evolving and disintegrating over the course of the exhibition.

Urs Fischer: Oscar the Grouch

In this catalogue for Urs Fischer’s 2010 solo exhibition at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, a cast aluminum grave pierces a ceiling, the exhibition space becomes an excavation site, and, in a gallery wallpapered with a trompe l’oeil reproduction of his living room featuring artworks from his extensive private collection, wax figures of collector Peter Brant have been set alight and slowly melt away, dissolving into puddles. Through his audacious formal investigations of scale and material, Fischer creates an off-kilter installation that disconcerts and entrances.