What do you get when you combine art collector Peter Brant with artist Urs Fischer? You get “Oscar the Grouch”, Peter on fire, and a reason to visit Greenwich, Connecticut. The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, which opened it’s doors to the public last year, is currently exhibiting their first solo show with the work of Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Filling the three generous gallery spaces, this is a large concentration of Urs’ work, sitting in a converted apple barn in the midst of a manicured countryside. The work throughout the show vacillates between reproduction and pure destruction. Two of the three posh gallery spaces have enormous holes dug right through the floorboards. In the upper gallery, the cavity in the ground reads like an invitation from the grim reaper.
Flanked by three “dust bunny” paintings as well as a handful of Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermy pigeons, Urs provides a humorous element of grit to an otherwise pristine space. The big brother version of the hole in located in the second gallery space, at the bottom of the stairs. You might experience slight vertigo as you make your way along the narrow lip of floor surrounding the concave center. Once you brave the hole, it leads you to an open doorframe, and you will most likely begin to laugh out loud. At least I did, as you peek into a miniaturized version of all the spaces you already walked through, down to almond sized exit signs and overhead lights. The shift in scale reminded me of Queen Mary’s dollhouse in Windsor’s castle. In both cases, luxury dwarfed and viewed from a vantage point few of us ever get to assume, from above. And then, as if to compliment our fleeting feeling of empowerment, we enter into Peter Brant’s living room, or a reproduction of Peter Brant’s living room, which has been compressed into photographic wallpaper, and covers the room like a Baroque trompe l’oeil. Every detail of the original private space – photos on a table of the collector with his family, or him alone on horseback, his books and his trophies sitting on the bookshelves, vases on the mantle piece, his Jeff Koons lobster and a near by Andy Warhol – all of it, reproduced for us to view. In the center of the room, stands a wax sculpture of Peter Brant himself, complete with a wick at the crown of his head, lit and burning. And just in case you still didn’t get it, the bottom half of the grave cut out of the floors upstairs, juts from the ceiling above the burning head. The riddle to most of the work in the collection answers itself almost as soon as it’s been asked. The only one left hanging is the name of the show itself, “Oscar the Grouch”. Which one of us is the monster in the trashcan?
