Berta Fischer, Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin. Photo Bernd Borchardt
A translucent spidery object in toxic yellow, a curtain of shredded Plexiglas covered with a cracked-up layer of bronze painting, a blue blob with multi-coloured buttons, and a bloom in lime green plastic affixed to a wall – these are some of Berta Fischer’s pieces currently on view at Berlin’s Barbara Weiss Gallery. Completely transforming the exhibition space, the show feels like taking a stroll through a fantastical landscape in someone’s imagined sci-fi scenario, when plastic becomes integral part of living organisms. A red and green column of intertwined, punctured swirls even bears some resemblance to a DNA strip.
And yet the pieces are seductive in their lightness and beauty. Fischer has a knack to turn the rigid interior of a gallery into an almost inconceivable land of mind-boggling objects. They are both menacing mutants and luring creatures, and the inherent tension and sense of fragility that accompany them is characteristic to the artist, who has been working with synthetic materials for years, always testing the limits of their stability. (This was also put to the test at the show’s opening night, where a spidery piece lost some of its ends). While beauty and art may not always go hand-in-hand, here we see a convincing argument for sculptures both thought provoking and bedazzling at the same time. So much so, one would want to stare at them, touch them, and play with them, while losing one’s self-consciousness outside of the walls of the gallery.
Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin Until April 19, 2013