Born in Zürich, Switzerland in 1973, Fischer studied photography at the Schule für Gestaltung before moving through Amsterdam, London, and Berlin, eventually settling between Los Angeles and New York. He worked early on as a bouncer at Zürich nightclubs, and in Berlin and New York shared studios with the painter Rudolf Stingel. His first solo exhibition was held at Galerie Walcheturm in Zürich in 1996, marking the beginning of a career that would expand rapidly across Europe and North America over the following decade.
Furniture, and chairs in particular, have featured in Fischer’s work since the early 1990s, serving alternately as sculptural subjects, functional objects reframed by material distortion, and stand-ins for the human figure. In Studies for Chairs for Individual Seating Positions (1993), molds of the human body are draped over furniture, so that absence becomes the work’s primary motif; in Chair for a Table That Was Too Tall (1994), a chair is elongated to an absurd degree to solve an invented problem, transforming the functional logic of domestic objects into newly absurd, anthropomorphic forms.
Food and wax extend Fischer’s explorations of material instability into the register of time. In Untitled (Bread House) (2004-05), a chalet constructed from loaves of bread was left to be consumed by parakeets. Fischer’s wax sculptures, which he has produced since the early 2000s, operate on a similar principle: cast as portraits of recognizable figures and lit like candles, they melt gradually over the course of an exhibition. At the Venice Biennale in 2011, a full-scale wax reproduction of Giambologna’s The Rape of a Sabine Woman (1579/1583) was installed alongside wax figures of Rudolf Stingel and an office chair, all three melting in tandem.
Recent major institutional projects include Lovers at Museo Jumex, Mexico City in 2022, his first solo exhibition in Latin America, a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2013, and Madame Fisscher, at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice in 2012, where he was the first living artist to receive a monographic exhibition. Earlier significant exhibitions include Marguerite de Ponty at the New Museum, New York in 2009, and Kir Royal at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2004. Fischer has participated in the Venice Biennale on three occasions, in 2003, 2007 (with Ugo Rondinone), and 2011.
