Gina Fischli’s work revels in unattractive feelings that commercial and art institutions consider invalid or just too small to matter: the pathetic, futile, embarrassed, anxious, nostalgic, and sentimental. Underlying Fischli’s wry mischievousness is a nuanced callout to the defunct pageantry of the art world, of femininity, of motherhood, and of corporate responsibility that hungrily swallow intimate feelings in deference to optics. At times, Fischli’s work likens the prospect of an art emergency to a competitive cooking show with contestants in hysterics over a failed meringue. We’re told nothing is urgent in the art world, and, to a degree, this rings all too true. But if you’ve ever worked in a museum, you’ve probably cried in the bathroom.
Ultimately, Fischli’s work reminds us that embodied emotions run deep for people who make art, view art, and labor in service of art — and that these emotions are something to hold close to the chest. As cultural theorist Sianne Ngai argues in Ugly Feelings (2007): “Affective attitudes and dispositions have become […] the very lubricants of the economic [and social] system which they originally came into being to oppose.” In centering feelings that fly under the radar, Fischli might just slip through the fingers of those who tend to liquidate our inner worlds to produce propaganda for themselves. With attention to what is usually considered irreverent and superficial, she flouts institutional and market preferences for work that is representational or legibly biographical in nature; the more traumatic and painful, the better for profits. In her mash-up of “girlish” DIY aesthetics and Neo-pop on Prozac, Fischli’s cakes, pets, purses, and interiors enact an intentional, cheeky form of deception to outsmart this dynamic: will cuteness make them leave us alone? But also, how might a sweet face or nice platitude disguise — or reinforce — an imbalance of power? What do we need to feel comfortable with the fundamentally disturbed? A multitiered cake made of plaster, a glittery painting on plywood board — what are we celebrating, and what is underneath? Fischli’s subject matter functions a bit like candy to make the medicine go down, a euphemism scholar Adrienne Edwards has adapted for art with a critical bite behind an ebullient surface. Like Mary Poppins or the late Mike Kelley, with whom Fischli’s work was included in a two-person show at Galerie Hussenot in 2023, the artist loads up surfaces with a sugary spoonful (her cakes incorporate sugar and cement as materials) — and manages to sneak in a bitter pill to unsuspecting viewers.
Importantly, this approach is not at all satirical. It constitutes a genuine consideration of how surfaces operate — within cultural constructs and the work itself — through Fischli’s explorations of color, material, and processes of making that suggest it is both amateur and painstakingly crafted. In the spirit of Kelley’s legacy, Fischli avoids seamlessness and fetish but isn’t entirely homespun either. “I’m not interested in quick surface readings,” Kelley once said. “This is especially important in relation to my works that have a socialized veneer that seems to be a reiteration of mass cultural tropes.” Slightly askew and forlorn, Fischli’s cake castles are over the top and about to topple over with a cheerful, smooth patina resembling icing. Steeped in pathos, her artworks taking domesticated animals as subjects are displayed on pedestals but hastily patched in used fabric scraps, earless or headless, torn and slumped, or crouching in a humanlike fugue state. The kind that leads to dissociative tendencies that attenuate pain without offering a total way out: an emotional support animal, retail therapy, binges of The Great British Bake Off.
Ngai’s thinking is again useful in discussing the cycles that keep us trapped (under constant pressure to toil, to amass, to consume more, and to continue wanting) through the reinforcement vulnerability. With the withholding of rights, Ngai explains, social divisions are reinforced; Fischli cites gendered pay and associations with domesticity; through hyper-trite femme vocab points specifically to the devalued and misunderstood labor of motherhood as, at times, akin to a PTA bake sale. Her allegories of animals speak to the imposition of hierarchy. It’s a system designed to naturalize certain biases — based in wealth and whiteness — that devour the health of this world whole. A collision of power and vulnerability is obliquely evident in Fischli’s 2022 public work Ravenous and Predatory, featuring images of animals on banners along Cork Street in London. By substituting nation-state slogans or advertisements for cute critters and hunting predators, she lightly critiques the use of art as a kind of propaganda for “institution as community” — or civic beautifier, emphasized by the installation’s placement in the city’s primary gallery district. However, these repeated, stock nature photographs (of a mouse, a squirrel, a wolf) are not intended to be palliative. As the title suggests, these animals are hungry links in the food chain — recalling our unmet needs and their instrumentalization to perpetuate late capitalism’s all-consuming myth of survival of the fittest.
In a conversation between us, Fischli references Nestlé as one example of animal imagery being used to smooth the edges of corporate cruelty — in this case, a company known for its human rights breaches branded with a sweet logo of two little birds in a nest under their mother’s watchful eye. Adapted from Henry Nestlé’s family crest, the cartoonish graphic is the picture of marketing innocence. As Orwell wrote, “Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.” In 1977, Nestlé was accused of marketing powdered baby formula in areas with severe water contamination, a wicked act disguised by its branding. That same year, Douglas Crimp organized his iconic “Pictures” (1977) exhibition at Artists Space. Introducing appropriation as a defined artistic strategy he described as a “processes of quotation, excerption, framing, and staging,” Crimp’s observations offer a parallel to the ways in which corporate schemes elicit and adopt actual signifiers for tag lines and mission statements. In turn, authenticity and authorship of our emotional landscape are threatened as always “[u]nderneath each picture, there is another picture.” In the wake of this cultural history, Fischli and artists of her generation have reconfigured these tools to meet the accelerated speeds (and normalcy) with which images, selfhood, and reality layer, meld, and disperse. This, arguably, situates her practice among artists from Alake Schilling to Bunny Rogers to Maggie Lee who also traffic real feelings through various material and narrative ciphers that are both material and so-called immaterial as our inner lives are siphoned into tag lines and mission statements, but also shared with their peers via tender narratives or beloved characters.
As much as Fischli’s work engages a keen sense of the politics of display and image culture, her work rejects the prefab conceptualism at the heart of the Pictures Generation (1974–1984) and slick appearances of that time. In an ongoing series begun in 2020, Fischli riffs on Josef Albers’s “Homage to the Square” series (1950–1976), substituting his systematic Bauhaus exploration of color for a palette you might describe as “girly pop” — cotton-candy blues and peaches accented with glitter. She carries this technique into other self-aware, superficial images: giant dirty martinis (You Have Won, 2021), champagne flutes (One last one?, 2021), and Diet Coke cans. Apart from clear references to art-historical pop and minimalism, and despite the use of literal sparkles, her paintings refuse to glisten sleekly. Instead, Fischli’s work is marked by dissonance: scrappiness and gleeful execution, alluring and despondent, excited by banal home décor with a lingering sense that something is wrong here and that the artist is trying to work through it.
Expressions of tenderness — and its shadowy sides — abound in “No Rest For The Wicked” (2022) at Chapter NY, New York, where Fischli further probes the disquieting ways humans project onto animals. Pets as status symbols can be traced back to Queen Victoria’s attachment to dogs and their prevalence in reifying cultural values, such as “refined femininity,” with lapdogs as a must-have accessory of fashionable bourgeoisie women. The exhibition consists of collages and endearing sculptures of animals (puppies, kittens, rodents). Visibly injured with lumpy white plaster bandaging, some situated on hand-sewn pillows, Fischli’s pet sculptures long for reprieve and care. “I guess there is this weird cross between love and cruelty that is always visible in the ownership of pets,” Fischli said, “where maybe you make them pillows, and you style their fur, but there is this really dark oppression and cage-like life they’re living.” She continues:
There’s something similar, you wonder when you make art, too: you put all this love into the work, but sometimes art can be malignant. Especially in the last few years, you start to wonder what art can do and if it can do something. When is it helpful and when is it maybe hurtful?
Many of the works, such as Dreamy Dog (2022), fall somewhere in between; they resemble love-worn stuffed animals and taxidermized corpses, sewn up in a frenzy of messy stitches, torn denim, and other used fabrics, exuding a sense of futility while expected to compete and earn blue ribbons.
All of this levies a shrewd critique of consumer culture, the art market, the psychology of advertising, and how personal mythologies are inscribed (the traumatized childhood projected onto Kelley’s work, for example). It also burrows within such big topics and feelings, encountering the conflicting, paradoxical, and seemingly minor emotions associated with domestic and frivolous objects of desire. Fischli’s objects flicker in hybrid emotions, allowing contradictions in a way that “art as propaganda” does not. An element of delight might even characterize Fischli’s work, confectionary and soft, reminding us that art (and life) shouldn’t necessarily discount nostalgia and glimmers of comfort, especially amid inconceivable loss.
As we’ve been confined to images of ourselves in many respects, we are ripe for the taking, for lifting and re-use jpegs free-floating. In “No Rest For The Wicked,” Fischli uses photos taken by friends or design magazines — like those she flipped through with her mother growing up, imagining impeccable fantasy rooms — in oversized collages of dreary hotel entryways and other nondescript interiors: environments of luxe aspiration that read here as a hefty price tag for an empty life. In contrast to Karen Kilimnik’s precise cat collages set in royal palaces, Fischli’s haphazardly layered compositions of animal cutouts, decorative mid-century sconces, and beige wallpaper (Concord (Five Star Series), 2022) mimic the absurd, exuberant fragmentation of how media is consumed (and how we, too, are constantly consumed by it) — all while retaining the earnestness of a sentimental tween bedroom-style vision board that predated algorithms sleuthing you on Pinterest.
In an adjacent series of photographs of hotel interiors printed on large panels of wallpaper that read like bleak present-day frescoes in their dwarfing expansiveness, the viewer encounters scenes like Untitled (2023): near-empty giant glasses of red wine in a deserted white-tablecloth dining room with ubiquitous centerpieces of red candles and tiny roses. Maybe there isn’t an escape. You might say Fischli’s work, at times, offers the mood of a handmade sympathy card reproduced in mass (see Amore, 2023, in which prints of a personally rendered dripping heart are tucked neatly into a store display rack), asking the important question that no one wants to ask: if it already feels like we’re lifeless, our things, images, and words embalmed or broken, always anticipating their imaging and circulation only to be dead upon arrival again, what can art offer?
Maybe all an artist can do is to keep doing, allowing uncertainty to trickle in as part of the work itself. And I’d dare to claim that isn’t pathetic at all. As much as there’s a bleakness, her work equally has a measure of hope baked in — a way to whisper sincere affection in public, perhaps as the only possibility for keeping it safe. In its misshapen but caringly rendered forms, Fischli starts to imagine a provisional new kind of aspiration, one for repairing and protecting oneself and relationships and emotional states — especially the ugly ones.
