Curated by Jessica Morgan

The Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer’s gigantisms and tricksterish transformations will take over LA MoCA’s two most sizable spaces—Grand Avenue and the Geffen Contemporary—for his first true US retrospective. Among the forty-some works on view, his 2004–2005 house of bread, the melty wax replica of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women from the last Venice Biennale, and a new addition to Fischer’s series of squeezed bits of clay enlarged to Brobdingnagian proportions—this one to be forty-five feet tall—will flaunt the sculptural tumescence that has made the artist both a crowd and commerce favorite of the past fifteen years. If such ambition framed Fischer as emblematic of the messier, punkier heroic excess of the precollapse 2000s, Tate curator Jessica Morgan’s show offers a chance to reconsider it all with postlapsarian eyes. And while New York’s darlings are often LA’s bêtes noires, Fischer’s masterful rescalings and material magic appear to have been granted the commodious space that the artist’s oeuvre demands.

— Andrew Berardini