“Battito di Ciglia” at Massimo De Carlo (MDC) in Milan is a two-part exhibition by the New York-based Swiss artist Urs Fischer, who is the first artist to exhibit across MDC’s two Milan spaces on Via Giovanni Ventura and at Piazza Belgioioso. The exhibition runs through December 17.At the center of Fischer’s diverse practice — which spans photography, sculpture, painting, and installation — are the concepts of entropy and mutation, processed within the contexts of the everyday materials he uses, the spaces he occupies, and the viewers who encounter his work.At once provocative and evocative, introspective and extrospective, playful and dramatic, Fischer’s somewhat enigmatic modus operandi can be characterized by his engagement with the themes of daydreaming, somberness, research, irrationality, and darkness.Commenting on his work, Fischer has said: “Each work begins with a quick sketch, but as soon as I start to work with materials, something goes wrong. For example, the thing won’t stand up and my irritation about that leads to something else. My work never ends up looking the way I had intended. I don’t consider those sculptures unsuccessful. Something just developed while I was working. It’s a two way street. Your thoughts determine the images, and it is the images, in turn, which determine your thoughts.”Throughout the converted warehouse venue of Massimo De Carlo’s Ventura headquarters, Fischer has strategically placed 26 small-scale hand-painted and raw bronze sculptures, transforming the gallery into a “dazing miniature dreamlike tableau that captures moments in time.”The 26 vignettes — which continue Fischer’s signature employment of diverse, recurring motifs such as animals, furniture, fruit, candles, and skeletons — depict a range of unusual interactions, such as a candle stuck in a wedge of cheese, a rat playing a piano, and a horse crying.The newly inaugurated Piazza Belgioioso space features two new sculptures created by the artist using photography, painting, and glass making. The two pairs of cartoonishly enlarged, highly realistic eyeballs reflect the viewer and the space at the same time. The uneasy feeling of being followed by a vexatious gaze epitomizes the artist’s talent for transforming fragments of the everyday and the familiar into challenging yet mesmerizing works, investigating aspects like observation, perception, and scale.“Battito di Ciglia” runs through December 17 at Massimo De Carlo in Milan.
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