Urs Fischer Swiss, b. 1973

Urs Fischer is a renowned Swiss artist based in New York City known for his audacious, genre-defying works that seamlessly blend sculpture, installation, photography, and digital media. With an irreverent yet meticulous approach, Fischer transforms everyday objects into conceptual pieces that challenge perceptions and materials. Born in Zurich, Fischer initially studied photography before relocating to Amsterdam, then London, and eventually settling in New York in 2003. His early works featured unexpected interventions on furniture and other household items, covering them in everything from bread to rubber or wax to underscore the unstable nature of form. Fischer's practice evolved to include ambitious, room-sized sculptural environments constructed from moldable materials like clay, wax, aluminum, and concrete. His iconic "Untitled" lamp sculpture from 2011 melds a seemingly liquefied classical nude statue collapsing over a metal lamp base, simultaneously monumental yet ephemeral. Other major pieces depict sizable, contorted replicas of rain-soaked towels and fruit distorted to the point of appearing grotesque yet mesmerizing. Technique and illusion go hand-in-hand in Fischer's work, which experiments with perception through expertly rendered sculptural trompe l'oeils and digitally manipulated photographs and photo-sculptures. Recent series have inserted hallucinatory images into constructed environments or computer-grafted organic and inorganic forms in dreamlike compositions that unsettle the boundary between reality and fiction. Fischer represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and has had major exhibitions at institutions like the Centre Pompidou, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His shape-shifting, genre-bending work continually pushes the conceptual possibilities of sculpture toward imaginative, unsettling realms.