Berta Fischer (Installation View), via James Fuentes
Marking his second exhibition with the Berlin-based painter, James Fuentes’s current exhibition of works by Berta Fischer brings a summery energy to downtown, a selection of brightly-colored, technically impressive arrangements that underscore the artist’s abilities in the sculptural medium.
Berta Fischer (Installation View), via James Fuentes
Berta Fischer (Installation View), via James Fuentes
Fischer creates abstract sculptures using synthetic materials, working plastic and acrylic glass into complexly arrangements clusters that twist and bend in their pathway through space. Objects that draw their energy from simple contrasts of color, light, and form, Fischer’s sculptures appear to have a life of their own and together transform a space into an almost ethereal setting, bathing their surroundings in gentle halos of light, while pulling the viewer’s eyes through an orchestration of movements and fragments. Simultaneously regal and simple in their presentation, the exhibition seems to treat space as the ground against which each element serves as a gesture, an action and counterpoint that creates a swirling, kaleidoscopic final effect.
Berta Fischer (Installation View), via James Fuentes
The names of these sculptures, Sokal, Ubix, and Andil, for instance lend to their galactic nature, as if they had spiraled out of the heavens and into the gallery space in some sort of chaotic moment of self-realization, pausing as they descended from earth. Created with manufactured, synthetic elements and turned towards a more complex arrangement by the artist’s hand, the sculptures are organically shaped, a marriage of nature and artificiality. Characteristic of the artist’s practice, the sculptures have both soft and aggressive features, and can be interpreted as peaceful or ominous, depending on one’s point of view. The show seems to take this sense of space and time as its central tenet, an animating principle that provides an entry point for both the viewer’s experience of the work, and the artist’s continued evolution and iterations of her swirling landscapes, all employed towards the creation of a new gestural language.
Operating as a playful interpretation of space itself, Fischer’s works are on view through September 15th.
— D. Creahan
Read more:
Berta Fischer at James Fuentes [Exhibition Site]
