Urs FischerShucks & Aww

Salon 94 Design is pleased to present Shucks & Aww, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of design by Swiss-born, Los Angeles–based artist Urs Fischer (b. 1973, Zurich). Known for his unpredictable, materially omnivorous practice spanning sculpture, installation, painting, and photography, Fischer now turns his attention to design.

Occupying the gallery’s first two floors, Shucks & Aww debuts functional objects—seating, lighting, and other domestic forms—infused with humor, visual wit, and exacting craftsmanship that elevates the banal into the exceptional. The first floor acts as a retrospective survey, tracing Fischer’s evolution toward design. Works therein serve as stepping stones: a filigreed white chair clasped by two disembodied hands becomes both furniture and absurdist sculpture. When context and function meet, a dual identity as both practical furniture and provocative art object emerges. It’s a callback to works like his 1994 piece Untitled (Chair for a Table That Was Too Tall), comprised of a folding chair, tape, wood, foam, vinyl, and screws; it’s a perfect example of a sculptural “solution” to functional problem. It’s design as problem-solving through art.

Throughout the exhibition, Fischer’s imagined cats prowl— balancing atop readymade chairs, embracing legs, or stalking a bronze bird that doubles as a light switch. Upstairs, fruit-shaped cushions scatter across the floor, plastic bags become leather sofas, and a hot pink lamp cradles an egg like it’s asking a question. One plastic chair turns out to be hand-cast bronze; another shelters a shy puppy. Discarded cans, bottles, and receipts reappear as light fixtures or vases, their functions entwined with the intimacy of use in everyday life.

Mirrors recur as both objects and metaphors, reflecting viewers alongside Fischer’s creations, transforming the human presence into an image. A bronze chair painted plasticine-green with a long tail reads as both a piece of furniture and line drawing in space; Fischer has a knack for presenting and re-presenting the mundane until it becomes the extra-ordinary, for showing us how to approach the commonplace with fresh eyes and an open mind.

Furniture and the built environment are a long-standing presence in Fischer’s work. For over three decades, seats, lounges, mirrors, lamps, and image-as-table have acted as conceptual provocations. Like his large-scale installations Fischer’s design work operates in a space between reality and fantasy, collapsing oppositions: construction and deconstruction, permanence and impermanence, utility and absurdity. Trained as a set designer and taught carpentry by his father, he saws, carves, and molds his optical illusions and conceptual sleights-of-hand with a blend of technical precision and playful irreverence.

Whether legible at first glance or not, a coherent vision emerges— perhaps it'll hit you beneath a golden curtain of rain (a deluge of suspended glass drops, hand-blown in Venice). In Fischer’s world, the illogical is persuasive and function is an emergent property of poetry that leads into a series of encounters with far-fetched propositions that you inexplicably find yourself agreeing with.

Born in Zurich, Fischer studied photography at the Schule für Gestaltung before an itinerant career across Europe and the U.S. His work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; MoCA, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Shucks & Aww marks a new chapter in his career, collapsing boundaries not only between mediums but between the conceptual and the quotidian.

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