urs fischer

PROBLEM PAINTINGS

These works are part of Urs Fischer’s Problem Paintings series. After using images of food and industrial hardware, he turned to superimposing flowers over the faces of cinematic icons — Grace Kelly, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others — thereby interrupting their recognizability and glamour with another image of conventional beauty: flowers. This creates a sense of redundancy and saturation, while establishing a connection between nature and the celebrity system, each of which has its own strategies of seduction.

Through these juxtapositions, Fischer produces conflicting associations — from the erotic charge of flowers to the short lifespan of youth and fame — by opposing the quasi-divine glamour of cinematic icons to the decorative elements of everyday life. The collision of these registers reveals glamour not as an ideal but as a temporary construction destined to fade, while also exposing the seductiveness of painting itself as…