Urs Fischer’s bold and playful work is the perfect antidote to the winter blues – even though the Swiss artist has brought 3,000 plaster raindrops to Sadie Coles’s Soho gallery. Titled ‘Melodrama’, his cloud of tiny sculptures, all hung from the ceiling by fishing wire, create a spectrum of pink, peach, and turquoise pastels. There’s a density to this piece, but somehow a lightness too; as if air molecules had become visible. A bizarre feeling emerges – am I underwater or on the ground? Am I wet or dry?
A sense of surrealism is heightened by the decrepit clay torsos strewn across equally decrepit chaise lounges around the vast gallery. One figure has even been replaced by a skinny carrot.
This is an exhibition of dualities: you’re struck by the implied motion of these objects, diagonally ‘hailing’ downward, yet they’re completely still; the nude, decapitated female bodies that recline on Fischer’s couches combine morbidity and eroticism. Rain is a symbol of fertility, but everything here is decaying. Everything is a copy or replica, yet the elements of this show are all subtly different.
So what’s the melodrama that Fischer is referring to? The art world? Humanity? Perhaps he’s saying that sometimes we just need to lie down, and realise how ridiculous – and extraordinary – life can be.
Peter Yeung