Rob Fischer
dal 18/1/2007 al 2/3/2007
Segnalato da
18/1/2007
Rob Fischer
Max Wigram Gallery, London
On show a new large sculpture and an accompanying series of photo-essays referring to road signs from a motorway that the artist has remade to physically hold together the free-standing meandering pathway that occupies the gallery space.
Solo show
Presented for the first time in the UK, American artist Rob Fischer will exhibit a new large sculpture and an accompanying series of photo-essays referring to road signs from a motorway that the artist has remade to physically hold together the free-standing meandering pathway that occupies the gallery space.
Fischer hankers after found objects and abandoned caravans, houses, cars that are quintessential parts of the vast expanse of the American Midwest. Constructed from salvaged materials like rusty dumpsters or old floorboards as it can be seen in the exhibition, Fischer’s objects cleverly combine the physical properties and thinking methods of the seminal artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, in particular taking a closer look to the latter’s notions of entropy and excavation. In 2005, for instance, the artist irrigated a greenhouse containing a real tire track “excavated" from his studio’s yard (Summary [Goodyear Ecology]). Although Fischer gleans his working materials either from scrap heaps, wallboards or swamps, his sophisticated grasp of space can be seen in the way his modular sculptures are monumentally assembled in closet-sized rectangles connecting like labyrinths by way of pipe scaffoldings.
A new series of 27 prints of road signs, lights and wild animals have been taken by surveillance cameras, similarly to the usage of stealth cameras set up to take the previous photo series Highway 71 No. 1-3 (2004-05) shot from the car window of bedraggled Midwestern roadside trailer homes over which he painted fake orange flames as an act of simulated vandalism. Having installed in the woods lights and wires forming a grid that echoes the network of water pipes of his former swamp projects, these lit the forest at night as an attempt to create a sense of security but also to study the absurdity of why bugs are attracted to them. Fischer’s new body of sign works include also quotes hand-painted similar to signage along rural roads: rather than advertising items on sale, these are statements of identity which “governing instrument is individual, anti-authoritative human consciousness." (James Agee & Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939)
Fischer (b. 1968, Minneapolis, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn (New York). He was recipient of the Bush Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship (1999) and in 1997 completed an artist residency at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per l’Arte (Guarene, Italy). Recent solo exhibitions in 2005 include Cohan & Leslie and Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria (both NY) and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (California). Recent group exhibitions include, amongst others, Greater New York at P.S.1/MoMa (NY, 2005), Trials and Terrors at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, 2005), I feel mysterious today… at Palm Beach ICA (Florida, 2004) and the 2004 Whitney Biennial (NY). His work is going to be featured in the forthcoming Cream 4 by Phaidon Press.
Image: Rob Fischer "Form Derived From A Highway" 2006
Max Wigram Gallery
99 New Bond Street - London
Free admission