URS FISCHER: Denominator at Gagosian (24th Street)
September 9–October 15, 2022
Objects are an extension of our bodies, our needs, our desires.
—Urs Fischer
Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Urs Fischer in New York, coinciding with his presentation at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles.
Denominator features three new projects: Denominator (2020–22), a large sculpture composed of LED screens; People (2022), an installation based on a room at the National Gallery, London; and CHAOƧ #501, the culmination of the CHAOƧ series of digital sculptures.
Denominator is a 12-foot cube constructed from LED screens that display a sequence of fragments from international television commercials in a shifting composition that spans the history of the medium. Through the use of AI algorithms, the commercials have been deconstructed into individual shots, which are then grouped by theme or color and displayed in layered patterns and choreographed sequences.
People is a full-scale recontextualization of room 43 of the National Gallery, overlaid with a 360-degree projection of heads sourced from online videos. In this installation, the turn-of-the-century museum interior becomes a medium, illuminating occidental culture at the moment of its decoupling from institutional power and transforming it into an individualized form of expression, the projected heads representing thousands of people in the act of sharing their opinions with remote audiences.
CHAOƧ #501 is the culmination of a multiyear series of digital sculptures. The inaugural visualization on view in New York is a two-dimensional rendering—displayed on a 14-by-30-foot 8K wall display—in which all one thousand digital objects from the CHAOƧ series move independently of each other through a defined space. Each element in the CHAOƧ series is based on an everyday object that has undergone a metamorphosis from physical to digital existence through a variety of scanning processes. The details and imperfections found in the physical world are intentionally preserved.
Together, the objects assembled in CHAOƧ #501 form a subjective encyclopedic composition that tells the story of humanity through the artifacts it leaves behind. We primarily interact with matter that has been altered, cultivated, engineered, or manufactured, and as we fill the planet with new products, the variety of flora, fauna, and funga diminishes.
