Urs Fischer

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

URS FISCHER
Text by Jessica Morgan, Ulrich Lehmann.
KIITO-SAN
ISBN: 9780984721047 | US $40.00
Pub Date: 6/30/2013
Active | In stock

URS FISCHER: 2000 WORDS
Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Jessica Morgan.
DESTE FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
ISBN: 9786185039011 | US $22.00
Pub Date: 9/30/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

URS FISCHER: OSCAR THE GROUCH
KIITO-SAN/THE BRANT FOUNDATION
ISBN: 9780983463214 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 1/31/2013
Active | Awaiting stock

URS FISCHER: SKINNY SUNRISE
Interview by Gerald Matt.
KIITO-SAN
ISBN: 9780984721023 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 7/31/2012
Active | Awaiting stock

URS FISCHER: MADAME FISSCHER
Introduction by Caroline Bourgeois. Text by Patricia Falguieres, Michele Robecchi.
KIITO-SAN
ISBN: 9780984721030 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 8/31/2012
Active | Awaiting stock

URS FISCHER & GEORG HEROLD: NECROPHONIA
KIITO-SAN
ISBN: 9780984721016 | US $30.00
Pub Date: 7/31/2012
Active | Awaiting stock

URS FISCHER: GOOD SMELL MAKE-UP TREE
Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Essay by Garrick Jones.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9782940271320 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 8/15/2005
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

URS FISCHER: SHOVEL IN A HOLE
Edited by Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Jessica Morgan, Bice Curiger, Massimiliano Gioni.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783037640371 | US $69.95
Pub Date: 12/31/2009
Out of Print | Not available

URS FISCHER: PARIS 1919
Edited by Urs Fischer. Text by Rein Wolfs.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783905770155 | US $29.00
Pub Date: 3/1/2007
Out of print | Not available

URS FISCHER: KIR ROYAL
Edited by Mirjam Varadinis. Essays by Bruce Hainley and Jàrg Heiser.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9782940271450 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 8/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer

Text by Jessica Morgan, Ulrich Lehmann.
Published by Kiito-San

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: 2000 Words

Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Jessica Morgan.
Published by DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art

Swiss artist Urs Fischer is best known for his unexpected transformations of quotidian objects and spectacularly disorienting installations. Combining grand gestures with a hallucinatory attitude, his work brings an alchemical approach to materials, images and the human body. An essay by the Tate’s Jessica Morgan reveals how Fischer continues to fracture our experience of the world around us.

Urs Fischer: Oscar the Grouch

Published by Kiito-San/The Brant Foundation

New York-based artist Urs Fischer (born 1973 in Zurich) has devised a surreal universe in which dust bunnies are magnified into landscapes and a lump of clay squeezed in the artist’s fist becomes a towering monolith. In this catalogue for Fischer’s solo exhibition at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, a cast aluminum grave pierces the ceiling and the exhibition space becomes an excavation site. A gallery wallpapered with trompe l’oeil reproductions of collector Peter Brant’s living room features artworks from his extensive private collection. Wax likenesses of Brant have been set alight and slowly melt away, dissolving into puddles. With these audacious formal investigations of scale and material, Fischer has produced an off-kilter installation that disconcerts and entrances.

Urs Fischer: Skinny Sunrise

Interview by Gerald Matt.
Published by Kiito-San

Documenting Urs Fischer’s solo exhibition of the same title at the Kunsthalle Wien in 2012, Skinny Sunrise presents a survey of the artist’s oeuvre. Among the new sculptures produced for the exhibition is Fischer’s first candle self-portrait, which is set alight and slowly burns down before our eyes, in the fashion of his acclaimed installation at the Arsenale di Venezia, which was described by the Financial Times as “the single most stunning new piece anywhere” in the 2011 Biennale.

Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher

Introduction by Caroline Bourgeois. Text by Patricia Falguieres, Michele Robecchi.
Published by Kiito-San

Bringing together more than 30 works from numerous international collections spanning almost two decades of genre-defying production, this volume presents an overview of the artist’s striking and often humorous work from the late 1990s to the present. It centers on an eponymously titled installation reconstituting the artist’s former studio within the exhibition space.

Urs Fischer & Georg Herold: Necrophonia

Published by Kiito-San

Necrophonia documents a 2011 collaborative exhibition by Urs Fischer and Georg Herold at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Transforming the gallery into a studio, the artists created sculptures based on models from a nearby art school. For the exhibition’s duration, the resulting sculptures--made of unfired clay, so that they started to disintegrate over time--were exhibited alongside the live nude models from which they were derived.

Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole

Edited by Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Jessica Morgan, Bice Curiger, Massimiliano Gioni.
Published by JRP|Ringier

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: Paris 1919

Edited by Urs Fischer. Text by Rein Wolfs.
Published by JRP|Ringier

One of the most striking and remarked-upon pieces at the 2006 Day For Night Whitney Biennial was Urs Fisher's, and the curators gave it pride of place: on entry, the first walls that viewers encountered had been torn open. Those new gallery entrances led through to an outsized candelabra, composed of two detailed aluminum tree-branches suspended parallel to the floor, each with a lit candle at one end, spinning in slow motion and creating interlocking circles of wax drippings on the floor. Those who remember it will not be surprised to find, in this survey of recent works, that Fischer has long been disorienting viewers with materials such as mirror-lined walls and gigantic plush bears.

Urs Fischer: Good Smell Make-Up Tree

Edited by Beatrix Ruf. Essay by Garrick Jones.
Published by JRP|Ringier

Urs Fischer's sculptures, drawings and installations, says curator Beatrix Ruf, strike the viewer “as if an Internet search engine had generated a massive number of hits leading to technical and mental breakdown.” This book has been conceived by the artist as a cross-reading of his process-related and “style-less” work through the arrangement of more than 200 images, including reproductions of works, installation views, studio shots and special features. Using a multitude of ordinary materials, Fischer creates non-hierarchical collages of objects and thoughts, high and low aesthetics, mundane and artistic memories, and personal and political interrogations. Laid out as a studio journal, the publication also includes musical scores from the London-based composer, engineer and consultant Garrick Jones, who wrote eight compositions inspired by Fischer's work. The scores are reproduced over 200 pages of the book, and recordings of them are available separately on CD or as downloads.

Urs Fischer: Kir Royal

Edited by Mirjam Varadinis. Essays by Bruce Hainley and Jàrg Heiser.
Published by JRP|Ringier

The heterogeneous punk spirit of Urs Fischer is in full threat in this catalogue from his recent retrospective exhibition (including many new works) at Kunsthaus Zrich. All materials were considered fair game, and Fischer took every possible liberty in the museum space. He cut huge walk-through holes in the gallery walls and leaned the removed pieces on their edges in the rooms. He made burning wax sculptures, put obstacles on the ground, and hung a DANGEr sign above it all. As curator Mirjam Varadinis says, "the familiarity of everyday motifs is undermined in a process of metamorphosis that renders [the work] uncanny and even threatening." Of course, a dose of humor, drawing upon the grotesque, informs the work as well. You can try to name influences, inspirations, and related artists--Thek, Nauman, Barney, Fischli & Weiss--but Fischer is sui generis.