Andreas Fischer: Are You OK?

Andreas Fischer, “Phillip Drummond explaining to Willis and Arnold that his ancestor bought and sold their ancestors,” 2018. Acrylic, pencil, cut fabric, and oil on canvas.

Curated by Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé

Artist’s Talk: Saturday, November 10, 3-5pm

“Are You OK?” continues Chicago artist Andreas Fischer’s longstanding inquiry into the meanings, roles, pleasures and possibilities of painting today. In a recent artist’s statement, Fischer writes that “confusion is all we really have, particularly about the everyday – the usual, the common – mainly because they seem so neutral. Nothing is neutral, right? There is also confusion about whether qualifications of those concepts resist exploding well enough for them to mean anything. Your everyday is not our everyday. Can we talk about this?” Fischer’s exhibition at RAC stages the conversation these words invite. Each of Fischer’s paintings is a conundrum, positing itself simultaneously as a mirror, a window, an arena, as a form of escape and an indexical confrontation with who he, the artist, and we, his viewers, think we are. So too, Fischer’s paintings put forth propositions, statements, mixed-messages, affirmations, apologies and perhaps most importantly,  a series of open-ended questions, starting with: ‘Are you OK?’  Which may in turn lead to other questions, like: ‘Is it ok for me to be me? For you to be you? For us to be ourselves, together?’  In this way, Fischer’s paintings combine the metaphorical, the lyrical and the literal as they enact the questions and struggles of what it means to be human together, with and through the medium of painting.

–Claudine Isé, Director, Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden

Top image caption:
Andreas Fischer, “Phillip Drummond explaining to Willis and Arnold that his ancestor bought and sold their ancestors,” 2018. Acrylic, pencil, cut fabric, and oil on canvas.