Urs Fischer Installation Artist at the New Museum
The New Museum is in one of our favorite spaces to see art in New York City. We love the building’s architecture, especially the way it looks, all blocky and stacked, as you approach it from Prince Street. We love the wide open gallery spaces, with their poured concrete floors, and all the graphic signage and typography inside, and the tile work in the bathrooms, and the bright green interior of the big elevator, and the little nook that houses a secret sculpture as you climb that great open staircase connecting the second and third floors, and, maybe most especially, we love standing out on the terrace off the Sky Room, looking out over Soho, and the Lower East Side.
Urs Fischer at the New Museum Takes Over Three Floors
We love it all. Really our only complaint with the New Museum is that they don’t have enough exhibitions that seem worth our hard-earned $12. So when we heard that installation artist Urs Fischer–who did this great gallery show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise–was taking over the museum’s three big upper floors from now through February, we knew we had to return to the space. And though the installation, Marguerite de Ponty, maybe would feel more at home in Chelsea, and for free–it only takes about 15 minutes to get through it all–there are enough moments of genuine delight that we can wholeheartedly recommend a visit, especially if you’ve never been.
The heart–and the best part–of Urs Fischer’s installation artwork is on the second floor, where the installation artist has assembled more than 50 mirrored chrome boxes, each with a single photographed object, seen from all sides: the Empire State Building, a lipstick, a cardboard cutout of Ashanti, a sneaker, a Froot Loop marshmallow treat, a chain hanging the ceiling, a London phone booth, a raw t-bone steak, and so on. Although we can’t really say what it all “means”, the bright shiny fakeness of it all made us smile.
The other two galleries at the New Museum given to Fischer’s installation artwork are less compelling, mostly perhaps because the star of the third floor, a realistic mechanical tongue sticking out from a hole in the wall, razzing passersby, was “temporarily out of service.” The melting lilac piano and stool set here was pretty striking, though. The fourth floor is better, and there is certainly drama to Urs Fischer’s massive, blobby, floating aluminum sculptures, which seem both oppressively weighty and elegantly weightless at the same time.
Urs Fischer at the New Museum details:
Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty will be at the New Museum until February 7, 2010. The New Museum is located at 235 Bowery, at the eastern end of Prince Street, and is open on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from 12:00 noon until 6:00 p.m., and on Thursdays from 12:00 until 9:00. Admission is free from 6:00 until 9:00 every Thursday night; the Sky Room and its terrace is only open on the weekends.
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