Urs Fischer x Hospitalet, Poster

Urs Fischer x Hospitalet
Poster (Unframed )
Dimensions: 100 x 70 cm

$30

This poster was designed for ‘THE WORLD WAS ALWAYS ENDING’ by Urs Fischer, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery at Hospitalet in Stockholm.

Comprising forty-three new sculptures, the exhibition marks Fischer’s first solo presentation in Scandinavia and the unveiling of ‘Flower Guy’, his first public sculpture in the region, now permanently installed in the Hospitalet Sculpture Park.

Across the bay from Hospitalet, in the gardens of Moderna Museet, stand Picasso’s vast concrete reliefs that emerged from his long preoccupation with Edouard Manet’s controversial 1863 painting ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. Cast by Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar from Picasso’s cardboard cutout models, they are a poetic testament to his dialogue as much with the history of painting as with that work, the result of a sustained encounter with the gaze, the body and the space between them. Their sculpted forms are animated and improbably defined by drawn lines on the concrete surface. They are both sculptures and drawings at the same time. The incongruity of the apparently hastily executed sketch being writ large on concrete, to be preserved in perpetuity, is the friction that profoundly informs both Urs Fischer’s new permanent sculpture and this exhibition.

Always sensitive to context – the immediate physical space a work will sit in – as well as the cultural legacy of a place, Fischer has taken the baton and added to the conversation. In the Baroque gardens of the Hospitalet Sculpture Park kneels ‘Flower Guy’, a gentle figure, inclining as he tends a flower, a secular St Francis perhaps – though the title is comically casual and non-specific. No grandiose claims to artistic legacy here, its scale notwithstanding. Cats prowl, leap and frolic mischievously around him and he lets them. With the exception of three, they are black. Their eyes light up at night. Are they Macavity or Poe’s black cat? Benign or malignant? Portents of good luck or bad? Or all of the above? Fischer leaves you to wonder. The simplicity of the work and its staging deliberately belies the complexity of its structure – the mechanics of the support and lighting are deftly hidden underground. The cartoonish figure is drawn out on the concrete surface. This too is both sculptural object and drawing, and a work that deliberately makes no claims to be eternal.

– Katharine Kostyál