From Sadie Coles: This exhibition, the gallery’s twelfth solo show with Urs Fischer since the first in 2003, is a compendium of the artist’s playful experiments in painting and installation. The paintings in Scratch & Sniff present an accumulative exercise in the physical building of images, engaging different applications of painting, photography and ink-jet printing layered together to create a heightened spatial dimension with teasingly textured and raised surfaces. The images they conjure or appropriate (as both simultaneously occur within each painting) can be figurative or fragmented: there are oblique figures, pop compilations and abstracted landscapes. Like a theatre of flat stage sets, each is built from front to back or from back to front: they float between flatness and depth, between digital and analogue, alternating physical gesture and on-screen experience.
One of the paintings, Meditations (2024), captures a screengrab of an Amazon search for books on politics today. This digital skin, hovering above the painted background presents as a kind of flag, reflecting the anxiety of our time in loud, enhanced, powered-up colour. Within the context of impatient contemporary living, this work – and the overall busy experience of the exhibitionenvironment – reflects our urgent computation of the mass of visual images we are invited, or forced, to consume every day.
The floor of the entire gallery is laid in vinyl printed with an image of Fischer’s LA studio flooring – paint splattered and smeared, the traces of ink and footprints present as a stage for the paintings, placing the viewer within the studio in energised real time, and alluding to previous wallpaper installations that reconfigured artworks in an alternative physical reality. In Fischer’s 2009 Marguerite de Ponty exhibition at the New Museum, New York, the artist photographed and reprinted every inch of the building’s architecture, reworking it to create a wallpaper that covered the same ceiling and walls, playing with the fundamentals of art and space to form a maddening simulation. In Scratch and Sniff Fischer returns his audience’s attention to the process of art-making, chronologising the development of his practice by bringing together printing, gestured painting, photography, and collage, while the floor emulates the very place such works and ideas were conceived. Presented in this way, linking image to process and to the artist’s history, allows for nostalgia about the development of picture-making at specific moments in Fischer’s practice, and is reflected in a new book of his latest paintings.