The Pink Lady referred to in the title of this sculpture, assumes a sitting position that allows for an immediate visual dialogue with the spectator. Simultaneously attractive and disturbing, the sculpture is marked by the strident, artificial colour and by its unfinished and changeable appearance: woman and furniture seem to have begun melting, at the brink of leaving the solid state, fixed in some impossible place, between the fleeting and the permanent.

‘Untitled (Pink Lady)’ exemplifies Urs Fischer’s interest in metamorphic processes and the defamiliarisation of everyday objects. His works evoke genres that have been historically associated with painting and sculpture – nude, landscape and still-life – subverting this relation to fine arts with an irreverant attitude towards aesthetic standards and by using unstable materials. Keenly interested in exploring processes of creation, manipulation, deterioration or destruction of materials, Fischer creates apparently poorly executed caricatured works that ignore protocols of the ‘well-crafted’ and through which he mocks the seriousness of the artistic discourse and relativises all concepts that traditionally confer value to the artwork.

Production: Serralves Foundation – Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto

Image: Urs Fischer, Untitled (Pink Lady), 2001. Coll. Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Aquisition in 2006.

Photography: Filipe Braga