Gagosian Beverly Hills presents an exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Urs Fischer. Constantly searching for new sculptural solutions, Fischer has an uncanny ability to envisage and produce objects undergoing psychic transformation in a bewildering range of materials. As its title suggests, this exhibition is conceived around fully functional fountains, “active sculptures” that transform the galleries into humid and energized places through which viewers can wander, as if in a town square. The lumpen fountains are cast in bronze from hand-built clay models; the rims of the water basins are powder-coated white, while the base is left as raw roseate metal. In one gallery, a sort of roughly formed, almost naturalistic blowhole spouts water, splashing merrily and drowning out all other sound; in the other, water hisses from a misting ball, and spills down over two tiered basins. A third fountain, also in cast bronze and delicately powder-coated in parts, is a human skeleton arched across a chair over which a draped garden hose gently flows—the latest in Fischer's lexicon of darkly humorous vanitas. Urs Fischer "Fountains" will be on view until October 17, 2015 at Gagosian Beverly Hills.
