URS FISCHER

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. It also recalls She—A Cathedral, the famed 1966 project by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, P.O. Ultvedt, and Pontus Hultén at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in which the architecturally scaled hollow figure of a pregnant woman contained a surprising variety of artworks and projects.

Finally, a video installation pays homage to Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room (1974), in which a closed-circuit arrangement of cameras, monitors, and mirrors in two connected rooms incorporates an eight-second lag that engenders a condition of controlled self-surveillance. In Fischer’s update to Graham’s foundational work of conceptual video, viewers watch live footage of themselves with a delay of five seconds, inspiring reflection on the idea that we now inhabit a perpetual present, a state in which reliable human memory has been reduced to the very briefest of durations.

In conjunction with After Nature, Académie de France à Rome–Villa Médicis will present Fischer’s sculpture Dance (2025) in its Renaissance gardens from September 18 through November 22, 2025.