Galerie Hubert Winter

Joel Fisher
Escape from Source
6. May – 18. June 2021
Ich war so besessen von dem Problem, daß ich acht Jahre lang unablässig darüber nachgedacht habe – von morgens, wenn ich aufwachte, bis nachts, wenn ich schlafen ging. Das ist eine lange Zeit, um über eine einzige Sache nachzudenken. Diese Odyssee ist nun zu Ende. Mein Denken ist zur Ruhe gekommen.
Die letzten Zeilen. In: Simon Singh, Fermats letzter Satz. Dt. v. K. Fritz. München, dtv, 2000

Galerie Hubert Winter is pleased to present Escape from Source, a solo exhibition by Joel Fisher (born 1947 in Salem, Ohio; lives and works in Vermont) and the second in a series of three solo exhibitions that explore the role of materiality within artistic production and its sculptural potential.

Joel Fisher’s practice is one of making. Making in its proper sense as in ‘causing’ or ‘bringing something into existence’. Fisher makes all his material from scratch and does little else besides make it; that is, his arrangements are minimal. He does not put two or more materials together to make a piece. The material undergoes a fundamental transformation which is obvious and functional, and Fisher thereby catalyzes the potential inherent in the process of making materials.

This potential unfolds in a field of tension between simple skill or craft and the necessity of Fisher’s activity as an intrinsic feature of the form of the resulting piece. The austere and simple qualities of his art are visually abstract and universal. Material is challenged, skill and craft are abandoned, and the process opens up to chance and possibility in the forming activity, emphasizing the conceptual rigor of Fisher’s practice.

Large squares of handmade paper straightforwardly tacked to the wall, all drawn from the same source, i.e. papermould, display their common origin in contrast to their individuality. They establish relations which provoke questions of identity. Drawings on small pieces of hand-crafted paper, so called apographs—works in their own right—enter relations with organically shaped bronze sculptures. ‘In each Apograph are several beginnings that later merge. Every apograph contains as plural possibilities.’[1] Fibers of the felt adhere to the paper during the drying process and these forms become seeds for drawings. In a next step of Fisher’s pictorial cycle, they spark sculptural works of an intimate sense of human scale. Fisher’s works are vibrant multiplicities oscillating between different scales and visual coordinates, the substantial and the accidental, plane and space as well as visuality and the haptic.

Galerie Hubert Winter is publishing the book Revising Chance by Joel Fisher on the occasion of the exhibition. It is published as volume VI of the series Carpe Diem by Galerie Hubert Winter.


[1] Joel Fisher, The Apographs, self-published, p.7.