“Eugène Atget” at Gagosian: New Paintings by Urs Fischer

Gagosian announces Eugène Atget, an exhibition of new paintings by Urs Fischer, opening on June 9. This marks the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery’s Athens location.

Working across an extraordinary range of materials and techniques, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation, reinterpreting familiar images and objects. Using various technologies to process his source material, which includes historical motifs, he merges the real with the imaginary. In Eugène Atget, the artist transforms the familiar interior of the neoclassical building at 22 Anapiron Polemou Street through a selection of urban landscapes that capture the experience of speed within a contemporary environment saturated with figures and faces, graphic elements, and text. Combining silkscreen, hand painting, and stenciling, Fischer adopts a collage-like aesthetic—drawing inspiration from artists ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Cady Noland—in his own depictions of Los Angeles, the city he now calls home. By layering original photographs above and beneath found and manipulated imagery, he fuses representation and abstraction to evoke the city’s overwhelming sensory intensity.

The exhibition’s title refers to the influential French photographer Eugène Atget, who sought to document, in a distinctly documentary manner, the rapidly disappearing urban landscape of “Old Paris” in the early twentieth century. Focusing on architecture that predated the French Revolution, Atget used his camera to create a layered historical archive rather than a series of isolated, stylized images. In his 1931 essay A Short History of Photography, Walter Benjamin highlighted the enduring significance of this undertaking, describing Atget as a pioneer of fragmentation who liberated photography from the classical spirit of nineteenth-century photographic practice. Turning his attention to the endless “film strip” of Los Angeles and to “places not made to be looked at,” Fischer approaches a magnificently chaotic palimpsest of images, signs, and textures with a similar sensibility.

The large-scale works presented in the exhibition frequently employ a panoramic perspective. Some have also been positioned to engage in dialogue with the surrounding streets and park, as seen through the gallery’s large windows. Combining elements drawn from print and digital advertising with original smartphone photographs-freeways, cars, buildings, and people-Fischer’s new paintings form a body of partly improvised visual and thematic compositions that seem to continue where Atget’s foundational project of urban documentation left off.

As gallerist Jeffrey Deitch has observed: “Artists, writers, and filmmakers who are not native to Los Angeles often create the most insightful portrayals of the city. As Urs Fischer looks out the window of a moving car, he records and transforms into painting what may be the most eloquent account of contemporary Los Angeles today.”