Can Big Art Make It in Las Vegas? Urs Fischer Weighs In.
The Swiss artist Urs Fischer suggests beginning our day together with coffee in the Village. Not the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village — on the edge of which he lived from the mid aughts until several years ago, commuting to giant studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens — though if you squint, there’s a resemblance to its earlier era: the maze of disorienting lanes, lots of cobblestone (sort of), neon-marqueed Italian-suggestive stands that sell iced lattes (watery) and cannolis (soggy).
No, this is the Las Vegas version, tucked beyond an ocean of slot machines in the far corner of the timeworn, low-lit New York-New York Hotel and Casino on that notorious stretch of real estate called the Strip. “There’s more to see here that’s interesting than some other newer places,” he says, leaning back on a metal bistro chair in front of the faux glassed-in storefront of a stage-set tenement building that showcases a top-hatted mannequin wrapped like a mummy, holding a wicker basket of prosthetic hands and feet. “It’s artificial, but in a good way.”
That, of course, is a matter of taste, as is the very notion of Las Vegas itself. Fischer, 51, known for his conceptually extravagant, hard-to-categorize works (a house made from loaves of bread, a giant pit dug in a gallery floor that looked as if it could collapse the building, a shower of huge blue plaster raindrops suspended from the ceiling, a series of supersized cast wax figures-cum-candles of people including the artist and director Julian Schnabel and the collector Dasha Zhukova, which melt to the floor over the course of an exhibition)has been visiting the city sporadically for three decades, most recently from Los Angeles. That’s where he lives with his two daughters — Charlotte, 15, and Grace, 8 — in a modest-sized but lushly gardened 1920s home near Dodger Stadium.
In December, however, he became a more permanent presence in the desert entertainment mecca when the delay-plagued, 67-story Fontainebleau, a casino and 3,644-room hotel that cost $3.7 billion, debuted its “Urs Fischer Gallery.”
In the middle of the cavernous space, on a round pedestal, stands a craggy, otherworldly 46-foot-tall, 17-ton, gold-leaf and cast-aluminum abstract sculpture called “The Lovers #3,” which suggests two asteroids from dueling solar systems locked in an embrace. A pair of monumental vividly colored paintings — big as Times Square billboards — adorn the walls flanking it. The longest escalator in the state — 150feet — runs up one side of the room to a near-bare mezzanine; the idea is for visitors to see the enormous works by one of the art world’s superstars from a drone’s-eye view.
