From April 2 through September 18, Museo Jumex in Mexico City will present Urs Fischer: Lovers, a 20-year survey of one of the most internationally celebrated artists working today and the artist’s first solo show in Latin America. Organized by Museo Jumex with guest curator Francesco Bonami, Urs Fischer: Lovers brings together new pieces made for the museum with works from international public and private collections as well as the artist’s own archive. Together, the works exhibit the wide-ranging creativity, humor, and depth of the artist’s practice

Created specifically for Museo Jumex, The Lovers #2 is a 10-meter-high monumental sculpture made of cast aluminum, stainless steel, and gold leaf, showing two forms meeting, one balanced on top of the other. Installed on the museum’s plaza, the sculpture sits in dialogue with the museum’s architecture designed by David Chipperfield and engages viewers in a play on multiple art historical references that are recurrent themes in Fischer’s practice.

The exhibition will also feature some of the artist’s signature pieces. Two new life-sized portraits cast as candles will be presented, including one of philanthropist, visionary, and Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo President Eugenio López Alonso. The candle portraits will burn over the course of the exhibition, marking the unavoidable passage of time.

Lovers is installed thematically, with each floor of the exhibition offering the viewer a distinct experience, creating shifts in emotion and perception and encouraging both a focused and detached gaze.

“Lovers is a beautiful hymn to the energy of life. To the forces that shape it and that consume it. To the feelings, the emotions and the fears that make life in general, no matter what, a wonderful adventure, a play, or a game with its winners and losers. The goal of this show is to be beautiful, experiential and exciting to watch, a game for the kids in the park to play while the grownups have fun on the side as they watch,” said Bonami.

“Museo Jumex is proud to present a solo show of one of the most fascinating artists of our time in Mexico. It is an honor to have been asked to sit for a portrait candle for this landmark exhibition,” said Eugenio López Alonso. “I hope the people of Mexico City will embrace this extraordinary artist.”

In the third floor gallery, a landscape is created by a variety of sculptures and paintings that have been produced over more than 25 years. The cacophony of styles, messages, scales, and relationships offers viewers a look at Fischer’s early creative process, revealing his fascination with both the ideas of play and existentialism. A mirror cat sits in the middle of a roughly built hall of mirrors (Dr. Katzelberg (Zivilisationsruine), 1999). Devoted to details rather than spectacular works, Fischer encourages viewers to shift their gaze from small works—a mechanical tongue sticking out from a wall (Noisette, 2009)—to larger sculptures, such as a bed crushed under a pile of concrete (Kratz, 2011). Works that appear as sleight of hand, such as a toilet bowl filled with fresh fruit (Untitled, 2015), reference Duchamps’s ready-mades. A broom lifted by a balloon (A Place Called Novosibirsk, 2004), a butterfly resting on a fresh croissant (Nickname, 2009), a painting done moving a finger on the screen of an iPad (Shelf, 2019) highlight how Fischer’s work is a dialogue between simplicity and complexity. A chair and a cigarette lighter grafted to each other (You Can Not Win, 2003) is an image that the artist has returned to recently in his exploration of the new digital world of NFT art.

The second floor returns to the Rococo. A large installation of raindrops (Melody, 2019) occupies most of the gallery. A pair of mechanical snails (Maybe, 2019) slowly slide around the space and a haunted wooden door (Untitled (Door), 2006) adds a fairytale mood to the experience. 

On the first floor, an aluminum rhinoceros bombarded by a myriad of objects (Things, 2017) is the centerpiece. The life-size figure of a rhinoceros represents human history—grounded yet sustaining the aggression and consumerism, a monument to permanence and consumption, entropy, and gravity. In the same gallery, Fischer's portrait candles will burn continuously. Seen through the gallery window, another skeleton (Invisible Mother, 2015) serves as a reminder that not everything disappears after we cross the threshold to another world.