Massimo De Carlo inaugurates its 2016-2017 season in Milan with an exhibition in two parts by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer.

Urs Fischer is the first artist to exhibit in Massimo De Carlo’s two spaces: at the recently inaugurated space at Palazzo Belgioioso and in the gallery’s headquarters on Via Ventura. Shifting between the familiar and the unknown, Urs Fischer’s world is populated by sculptures, installations, paintings, and drawings that construct an infinite anthology of mutations. With wit and an often-dark sense of humour, Fischer’s work provokes and evokes, playing with archetypes through the radical transformation of materials.

In the converted warehouse venue of Via Ventura Urs Fischer has created a microcosm of smallscale hand-painted and raw bronze sculptures. The twenty-six sculptures are like poetic vignettes that depict unusual interactions: they are delicate yet at the same time imposing, comical and shadowy as if they were hiding an allegorical secret. The gallery is transformed into a dazing miniature dreamlike tableau that captures moments in time: here these humorous reveries take the form of a satirical play on ordinariness. A barefoot man crawling into a crushed soda can, a nude lady reclining on a chaise longue next to a snail, a crying horse, a rat playing a piano: all these sculptures build a kaleidoscopic anthology of Urs Fischer’s imaginary, drawn from fragments of his career and aesthetics.

In the newly opened exhibition space in Piazza Belgioioso are two new sculptures: using photography, painting, and glass-making Urs Fischer has created two pairs of oversized, highly realistic eyeballs. These almost cartoonish sculptures reflect the viewer and the space at the same time, enhancing the uncomfortable feeling of being followed by a disturbing gaze.

Battito di Ciglia is a light-hearted investigation of scale, perception and observation that challenges the spatiality of the gallery and the contemplation of the viewer by playing with key themes of Urs Fischer’s practice: irrationality and darkness, playfulness and research, daydream and sombreness.

Urs Fischer (1973, Zurich) lives and works in New York. The artist has exhibited in prestigious institutions around the world with important solo shows. Amongst the most recent ones: Small Axe, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); ∞, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2015); Urs Fischer, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2013); Madame Fischer, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2012); Skinny Sunrise, Kunsthalle Wien, Wien (2012); Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty, New Museum, New York (2009). Urs Fischer has taken part in many prominent group shows such as, among others Capital: Debt — Territory — Utopia, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2016); Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Arts & Foods: Rituals since 1851, Expo Milan 2015, Triennale di Milano, Milan (2015); ArtLovers: Histoires d’art dans la collection Pinault, Grimaldi Forum Monaco (2014); Riotous Baroque. From Cattelan to Zurbarán—Tributes to Precarious Vitality, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2012); Les enfants terribles, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, Mexico (2009). Urs Fischer has taken part in the Venice Biennial in 2011, 2007, 2003.