Urs Fischer Spotlights Pluralistic Notions of Love

At Museo Jumex, Mexico City, the artist’s first institutional survey in Latin America celebrates the tenderness between friends, family, lovers and objects

Urs Fischer: Lovers at Museo Jumex is the artist’s first institutional exhibition in Latin America and the most elaborate survey of his work to date. Curated by Francesco Bonami, the show spans all three of the museum’s gallery floors, assembling a litany of objects together to create a so-called psychological theme park. Seducing us through colour, size and form, Fischer turns a spotlight on and dissects pluralistic notions of love. 

Outside the museum’s David Chipperfield-designed building stands Fisher’s The Lovers #2 (2018–22), a 10-meter-high shimmering gold and silver monolith that evokes a flickering tongue of flame. Much as Alexander Calder did, Fischer works with maquettes before blowing up his sculptures to ginormous proportions (in Fischer’s case at the Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen Art Foundry art production workshop in his native Switzerland). The artist’s choice of gold for The Lovers #2 is linked to the historical significance of the materials’ use in Mexico City, as in the opulent Altar de los Reyes (Altar of the Kings, 1718–37), located in the city’s Metropolitan Cathedral; and the iconically resplendent wings of Enrique Alciati’s El Ángel de la Independencia (The Angel of Independence, 1910), which dominates the Paseo de la Reforma, and whose monumental scale augments devotion to place, homeland and patrimony.

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