Urs Fischer: Monumental Sculpture

The nearly four-hundred-page volume groups works under thematic headings such as “holes,” “lines,” and “intersecting objects,” illustrating how the Swiss artist has explored and returned to specific sculptural problems over decades, and how his approaches have changed with technology.

In color photographs and short texts, the book illuminates the enormous variety of materials—including food, wax, unfired clay, found objects, stainless steel, cast bronze, and milled aluminum—through which Fischer has investigated ideas of space, perception, representation, and entropy. It documents works that use subtractive gestures such as cutting holes in walls or digging into the ground, as well as the Big Clays series of monumental public sculptures, in which a simple creative gesture is materialized at architectural scale.

Shipped with a printed cardboard support to protect its die-cut front cover, the book features an introductory essay by Róisín Tapponi that delves into Fischer’s poetics; a conversation between Jessica Morgan and the artist that examines his interest in scale and traces the evolution of his production processes; and entries on the artworks by book editor Priya Bhatnagar.