URS FISCHER: AFTER NATURE
GAGOSIAN is pleased to announce After Nature, an exhibition of new paintings, a sculpture, and a video installation by Urs Fischer at the gallery in Rome, opening on September 17, 2025.
September 17 – November 22, 2025
Marshaling a dizzying variety of materials and methods, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation. He distorts scale and reimagines common objects and images through technological intervention, reworking historical genres and motifs while embracing transformation and decay. In After Nature, Fischer presents a new suite of paintings on aluminum depicting dust salvaged from his studio floor, a large-scale soft sculpture of a reclining female figure, and an interactive video installation.
Irresistibly recalling Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding (1920), which captures the buildup of grime on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), Fischer’s eight new dust paintings pick up where his works with the same subject from 2007–10 leave off. Both closely related bodies of work have a sculptural heft, but the panels on view in Rome exhibit a more handmade feel than their predecessors. The partly screenprinted images’ polished grounds reflect the gallery’s interior and view of the sky, while their chaotic distribution of dust particles evokes an arid landscape or the scatter of stars across the firmament. These parallels establish the operation of a mesoscopic scale, bridging the gap between microscopic and macroscopic phenomena.
A large soft sculpture of a recumbent female figure, finished in a camouflage-like pattern of brown flocking and attended by two smaller, amoebic, ottoman-like forms in orange-red, extends Fischer’s career-long deconstruction of figural imagery while also functioning as a couch on which weary viewers are invited to rest. The artist thinks of the work as a visceral embodiment of the force of gravity, a static locus of attraction on which to pause or contemplate the rest of the exhibition.