Urs Fischer: The Kiss

Urs Fischer The Kiss Sadie Coles

Urs Fischer’s 2017 exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ will centre on a large-scale replica of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, cast in white Plasticine. The famous image of embracing lovers will morph and fragment over the course of the exhibition through the interventions of visitors, who will be free to remould the Plasticine at will. The image of an entwined couple also appears in a group of four new paintings, in which the artist uses classic movie stills as stock visual formulae – found images to be disrupted and redeployed.

Over the space of a month, Fischer’s Plasticine sculpture of The Kiss will transform from a recognisable motif (fractionally larger than Rodin’s first marble version) into an open- ended site of collaboration. The icon of modern sculpture will become a volatile object – able to be inscribed, pulled apart and remodelled spontaneously. The kissing figures are raised on a Plasticine pedestal onto which visitors will be able to climb, so as to become part of the sculptural group – transposed into the work of art.

Fischer’s version of The Kiss centralises the idea that an existing image of beauty, an art- historical ‘given’, can be destabilised and reformed through the agency of individuals. Each act of intervention turns the original model into something new: by starting with a fixed image, Fischer draws attention to the contingent processes of distortion and adaptation. In contrast to his participatory clay works of the past five years, which gradually crumble, or the wax-candle sculptures which dissolve over the course of an exhibition, the Plasticine model of The Kiss can be continually reshaped. Each state is equal to the next: the sculpture passes through multiple phases without order or hierarchy.

The four paintings on display upstairs extend the subject addressed in the sculpture.

Duration 01 February 2017 - 11 March 2017
Times Tues-Sat 11am-6pm
Cost Free
Venue Sadie Coles (Davies Street)
Address 1 Davies Street, London, W1K 3DB
Contact 020 7493 8611 / info@sadiecoles.com / www.sadiecoles.com

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