Gina Fischli “No Rest For The Wicked”

Chapter NY

This event has ended.

Chapter NY presents No Rest For The Wicked, Gina Fischli’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will feature sculptures and large-scale collaged works depicting city animals and pets such as dogs, cats, rats, or birds.

Rooted in her early studies of stage design, Fischli’s practice engages familiar mechanisms of sculpture and space with alternative processes of production, often using craft-related techniques and unusual materials. She transforms her banal subjects—including wine glasses, household furniture, and birthday cakes—into objects of desire with her own characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor.

For her exhibition at Chapter, Fischli plays with representations of animals and their role as placeholders for human traits and experiences. This body of work grew from an earlier unrealized project of window displays inspired by dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Interrupted by the pandemic, Fischli instead found herself trapped indoors surrounded by pillows and plush surfaces within her own domestic diorama, viewable to the outside world through exterior windows and computer screens. She started to create animal sculptures that felt more human-like—constructed and dressed in clothing and household materials—resting on hand-made cushions. As her work continued to evolve and the dissociative effects of isolation compounded, the artist’s sense of self began to diminish.

Unlike the idealized portrayals of fantastical animals in diorama displays, Fischli’s creatures are those that we cohabitate and interact with. Her resulting sculptures greet visitors at the front of the gallery in a deceitfully playful manner. Progressing through the exhibition space, they become increasingly deconstructed, abstract, and menacing. In Fischli’s collaged works she brings the animals together into confined spaces reminiscent of hotel lobbies. Crowded together, the species may begin to imagine collaborative plans or revolutions filled with conspiratorial potential.

Gina Fischli (b. 1989, Zurich) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. She received her MFA from the Royal Academy of Art, London in 2018 and her BFA from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg in 2015. She has had previous solo exhibitions at Soft Opening, London; Sandy Brown, Berlin; Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen; 303 Gallery, New York; SUNDY, London; DELF, Vienna; and Forde, Geneva. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; suns works, Zurich; Sentiment, Zurich; Stalla Madulain, Engadin; Mamoth Gallery, London; Sculpture Garden, Geneva Biennale, Parc des Eaux-Vives, Geneva; Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin; Fri Art, Fribourg; Weiss Falk, Basel; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg; Royal Academy, London; and Swiss Institute, New York; among others.