Madame Fisscher

Urs Fischer is the first living artist to be given a monographic exhibition at Palazzo Grassi. Over thirty works have been selected from the Pinault Collection and other international collections.

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"Madame Fisscher", conceived by Urs Fischer and curator Caroline Bourgeois, occupies Palazzo Grassi’s large atrium and entire first floor. The body of work on show presents Urs Fischer’s artistic career from the 1990s to 2012, and is enriched with some works that are exhibited here for the first time: from those he created in collaboration with Georg Herold to a collective sculptural project done together with students at Venice’s Academy of Fine Arts in the city’s public spaces.

Urs Fischer is considered one of the major sculptors of our time, and his work combines illusion and reality, violence and humour, eternity and transience, presenting the viewer with a creative universe that is simultaneously logical and absurd.

Fischer appropriates everyday objects – his ‘principal material’, par excellence – and transforms their meanings with a sharp sense of humour, a tendency towards paradox, expressive techniques and varied materials. Playing with surprise, entertainment, doubt and worry, Fischer questions himself over the course of the exhibition about the history of art, about sculpture, about our relationship with our bodies, about the concept of time and the status of the object.