Swiss-born, US-based prolific artist Urs Fischer is known for his extraordinary and unclassifiable range of witty and often absurd paintings, drawings and sculptures, in which he pairs and blends for a dramatic juxtaposition (imagine a horse fused with a complete horse). The interactive work attracted special attention: nature decayed and gradually descended into chaos. Fisher now brings the process of entropy into his landmark series of digital sculptures Chaos #1–#500 (2022).
“We are opening up a new dimension of creativity”: Urs Fisher Photo: Robert Banat; courtesy the artist and Gagosian
At Art Basel 2017, Fisher’s plasticine replica of Rodin’s “The Kiss” took center stage at Sadie Coles’ booth at its headquarters, where visitors were invited to tear off pieces of plasticine and use them to make their own sculptures, pressed against the gallery’s walls. on the wall. In 2021, at the opening of the Pinault Collection’s large space on the Cour de Commerce in Paris, Fischer presented his most ambitious pair of large-scale paraffin candle sculptures –Untitled (2011), full-size replica of Giambologna Rape of Sabine women Paired with life-size sculptures by his friend and collaborator Rudolf Stingl – who opens the exhibition showing the process of lighting candle wicks and allowing them to melt and collapse as they burn.
Now, in partnership with 1OF1— a premier digital art collector founded by venture capitalist, collector and patron Ryan Zurrer — Fisher will bring the same focus on entropy to Chaos #1–#500, the series will be sold in 2022 via NFTs (non-fungible tokens, programmable certificates of authenticity on the blockchain), with each of the 500 digital sculptures connected to its own NFT. For the series, Fisher created video sculptures that paired 3D renderings of everyday objects—tropical fish and computer keyboards; a wooden spoon and a clear ziplock bag; vintage European road maps and garden trowels—that accompanied each A play of digital sculptures that mesmerizingly spin, merge, and separate.
With the next phase of the project, Chaotic entropyowners of two or more originals confusion NFTs can be combined into new NFTs – provided by 1OF1 As its artistic director Lukas Amacher puts it The Art Newspaperwill provide “dedicated smart contract functionality to incorporate [the original] The tokens become one. Tokens selected by the owner will be destroyed. And a new token is created.” This new token will later be linked to a new video sculpture, which Fisher will create by fusing two or more pairs of renders from the new NFT smart contract. Chaos #1–#500.
“We are opening up a new dimension of creativity Chaotic entropy”, said Fisher, “offering collectors the opportunity to become co-creators of this evolving project. This new stage embodies the participatory spirit of digital art.
“This will be fun,” the artist said The Art Newspaper. He expects the process will free up some original works to “take on a next life.” He said he keeps about 10% of the original NFT himself. “I’m going to put everything I’ve got into it.”
owner confusion Tokens have a great example of how composition pieces come together in the following form: Chaos #501It is a digital sculpture of several works from the series, which will be exhibited on a giant screen (3m high, 9m wide) at Gagosian in New York in 2022. I remember. “It’s really overwhelming.” And, he said, “We can have smaller experiences, and we can unlock these pairs of [of renderings of household objects], which was fun and turned into something bigger when they communicated. We can blend them and see what happens.
Amach said that this is the first time that 1OF1 (which prefers to describe digital art as art in the digital age) has provided technical support to the artists they support. Zurrer talks about 1OF1’s mission to help outstanding digital artists secure their place in the art canon. 1OF1 joins the RF.C Collection (led by digital art patron Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile and designer Desiree Casoni) to acquire AI artwork by media artist Refik Anadol machine hallucination 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Echoes of the Earth: Archives of Life Earlier this year at the Serpentine Gallery in London; and Beeple’s world tour Humanity OneThe first physical work by the digital artist, Zurrer acquired it in 2021 for $28.9 million (4700 ETH).
“As collectors,” Amach said, “we are interested not only in Urs’s artwork, but also in his ability to convey agency to his audience. Chaotic entropyThe relationship between collector and artist transcends a basic business transaction and becomes a collaboration. This community-driven construction process is at the core of cryptocurrency’s native value, and it’s something we’re really excited about.
amach saw Chaotic entropy Returning to Fisher’s longstanding practice of participatory sculpture. “If you think about his candles, collectors have the choice to burn the candles or leave them as is. That choice comes at a cost,” Amach said. “The interesting part [with CHAOS ENTROPY] is that you will see a real-world gamified scenario where the collector has to make a decision. Do they prefer 10 pairs of individual objects, or do they want 20 objects rotating around each other and getting different pieces of art? This is based on their choice…which means there is a more direct interaction between the collector and the artist.
Play with scale
Fisher plans to achieve scale in this area, he said. Chaotic entropy stage, with Chaos #1–#500, where paired objects are in exact proportion to each other. For example, he might place a chair and a matchstick next to each other so that the size of the smaller object “becomes larger and the larger object becomes smaller.”
This sense of playfulness is integral to Fisher’s broad artistic sympathies and his oeuvre, including his monumental public sculptures. giant clay series. In December 2023, Fisher appeared on The Art Newspaper’s podcast A Brush With… and listed the works he couldn’t live without, which are both monumental (Stonehenge and Easter Island figures) , with an indescribable Baroque style (sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini) Apollo and Daphneabout 1622-25 and sleeping hermaphrodite1620).
Fisher said in December that as an artist, he was listening and waiting, not rushing. “Art has no purpose,” he said, “it just is.”
- Chaotic entropy Launching June 18 at ursfischer.com
- Urs Fisher: Monumental SculpturePriya Bhatnagar, Urs Fischer, Jessica Morgan and Róisín Tapponi (contributors), Gagosian, 396 pages, $150 (pb)
