URS FISCHER

Through an enormous diversity of materials and techniques, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation by reimagining familiar images and objects. Employing various technologies to manipulate his sources, which include historical motifs, he unites the real and the imagined. In Eugène Atget, the artist transforms the intimate neoclassical interior of 22 Anapiron Polemou Street with a selection of metropolitan landscapes that represent the experience of speeding through a contemporary environment saturated with figures and faces, graphics and text. Combining silkscreening, hand-painting, and stenciling, Fischer applies a collage aesthetic—informed by the work of artists from Robert Rauschenberg to Cady Noland—to his own observations of his adopted home of Los Angeles. Layering original photographs over and under found and manipulated imagery, he blends figuration with abstraction to conjure the city’s indiscriminate sensory overload.

The exhibition’s title cites the influential French photographer, who set out to record the fast-disappearing streetscape of “Old Paris” at the turn of the century in conspicuously documentary style. Focusing on architecture that predated the French Revolution, Atget used his camera to generate a multipartite historical archive as opposed to a succession of isolated and aestheticized tableaux. In his 1931 essay “A Short History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin pinpoints this project’s enduring importance, characterizing Atget as a pioneer of the fragment who was responsible for liberating the photographic medium from the classical aura of its nineteenth-century form. By training his eye on LA’s endless film strip of “places that are not made to be looked at,” Fischer brings a comparable sensibility to bear on a beautifully chaotic palimpsest of images, signs, and textures.

The large-scale works on display often make use of a panoramic perspective; some have also been installed to resonate with views of local streets and parkland visible through the gallery’s picture windows. Combining borrowings from print and digital advertising with original smartphone shots of highways, cars, buildings, and people, Fischer’s new paintings constitute a fresh set of part-improvised visual and thematic mash-ups that pick up from where Atget’s foundational work of urban biography leaves off. And as gallerist Jeffrey Deitch has observed, “Artists, writers, and filmmakers who are not native to Los Angeles often create the sharpest portrayal of the city. As Urs Fischer looks out the window of a moving car, he is capturing and then transforming into painting what may be the most resonant visual record of Los Angeles today.”