Urs Fischer: Good Smell, Make-Up Tree, Music by Garrick Jones

Urs Fischer's sculptures, drawings and installations, says curator Beatrix Ruf, strike the viewer “as if an Internet search engine had generated a massive number of hits leading to technical and mental breakdown.” This book has been conceived by the artist as a cross-reading of his process-related and “style-less” work through the arrangement of more than 200 images, including reproductions of works, installation views, studio shots and special features. Using a multitude of ordinary materials, Fischer creates non-hierarchical collages of objects and thoughts, high and low aesthetics, mundane and artistic memories, and personal and political interrogations. Laid out as a studio journal, the publication also includes musical scores from the London-based composer, engineer and consultant Garrick Jones, who wrote eight compositions inspired by Fischer's work. The scores are reproduced over 200 pages of the book, and recordings of them are available separately on CD or as downloads.

Urs Fischer was born in Zurich in 1973. He began training in photography but switched to sculpture, drawing, and painting at De Ateliers studio in Amsterdam. In recent years he has participated in numerous major international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale in 2003, and he had a solo show that year at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. He is represented by Gavin Brown gallery in New York and Sadie Coles in London.

Brice Marden was born in Bronxville, New York in 1938. He studied art at Boston University and Yale University in the late 50s and early 60s, developing a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, unique palette. Moved to New York after graduation, he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum and came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, furthering his interest in gridded compositions. He made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in 1964, the year of his first solo exhibition and a stay in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. The next few years saw his first solo show in New York, his employment as Robert Rauschenberg's assistant and multiple semesters as a painting instructor at SVA. Throughout the 1970s, Marden's work was showcased at Documenta, in a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and in various exhibitions that traveled throughout the United States. Trips to Rome and Pompeii strengthened his interest in Greek and Roman art and architecture. In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction, traveling to Thailand to learn about calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. He continued to exhibit regularly in New York throughout the 1990s and was the subject of two major traveling shows. Marden currently lives in New York City and Hydra, Greece.