Not just a chair: Urs Fischer elevates the banal through absurdity in Shucks & Aww

For Zurich-born artist Urs Fischer, a chair is never just a chair. Marking the leap from art to design, his recent solo exhibition Shucks & Aww put into focus his knack for subverting expectations and embracing humour. The Swiss designer and artist’s ‘characteristically unpredictable and aesthetically omnivorous oeuvre’ spanning sculptural design, installation, painting and photography, has long incorporated elements that are semi-functional and resist fixed categories. His objects, no matter the scale or nature, from furniture designs to entire built environments, speak for themselves, acting as extensions of himself in a number of ways. The design exhibition, presented by New York-based Salon 94 Design and part of the inaugural edition of MAZE Design, Basel, late last year, included some of these objects, such as UF (2015), Uppers (2004), Midnight (2017), Home (2003) and Lovelock (2024). An installation made of 700 hand-blown mirrored glass drops, Elegy (2025), was also on display at Shucks & Aww.

His distinct sensibility is evident across his recent body of design work, where lamps refuse to behave like lamps and chairs seem to wobble between caricature and critique, destabilising expectations. A familiar silhouette is rarely allowed to remain comfortable for long. Fischer explores design beyond the bounds of functionality, bringing absurdity and playfulness into conceptual and physical spaces. Steering away from being mere utilitarian objects, Fischer’s pieces act more as propositions, forwarding his ideas and evoking more in the eyes of the viewer.

“Like his sculptures, Fischer’s functional objects come with rigorous abstract underpinnings: he designs with metaphor in mind, adeptly deploying the vast repertoire of materials and limitless imagination at his disposal,” Salon 94 shares in the show’s press release. Divided into four spaces or sections, the exhibition explored his portfolio over the last three decades. It also showcased his more recent works from 2025, such as Pink Slice, Figure, Face and Bucolic Revolver.

The Pink Slice (2025) coffee table, made from plexi and plated bronze, derives its legs from the forms of everyday mechanical components such as a screw and a spring. The Wooden Top Hat (2025) table design, crafted from walnut wood and a metal plate, almost comes alive as an edible chocolate sculpture, while the Bucolic Revolver (2025) dining set evokes the feeling of stone sculptures, but is actually cast in bronze and fused glass. Fischer’s mirror designs, such as Figure (2025) and Face (2025), made from polyurethane foam, epoxy primer, oil mixtion and gold leaf, mimic various profiles of a human figure in distorted, cartoonish relief. The lacquered wood mirror 1896 (2025) adopts the form of a dressing table, hinting at vanity furniture that refuses domesticity.

Fischer’s chair designs perform with similar irreverence. The Twist Chair (2025), made from lacquered wood, foam and upholstery, and designed in brown, pink, yellow and white colour variants, exaggerates the armchair into a warped, pliable gesture. The Deliberator (2025), made from bronze, primer, enamel paint and gold leaf, is perhaps the most dramatic of these objects, with an exaggerated wing and a tail, dressed in vibrant blue and green hues.

Question (2025), another chair design in bronze, primer and enamel paint, has an antique-looking seating with an extended slender element, extending upwards in the shape of a question mark. The Big Dog Chair (2025) features a pastel blue minimal form with a bright yellow dog sculpture attached to one of its legs, while Aww & Order (2025) inverts the scale entirely, enlarging the dog into the dominant form and shrinking the chair into a sculptural appendage.

His lighting designs, likewise, aren't too far in following the same logic of playful contradiction: the Little Cubist (2025), a bronze lamp design built from predictably cuboidal forms but with irregularities in its finishing, evokes a fluid approach to designing something with strict geometry. The Cat Shadow Lamp (2025) and the Face Cat Lamp (2025), made from sheet metal and electrical components, operate somewhere between domestic lighting and visual jest—objects that illuminate while insisting on being looked at themselves.

Returning to the premise that a chair is never just a chair, Fischer’s latest product designs demonstrate how functional objects could become an inquiry of narrative, humour and provocation. By embracing absurdity, exaggeration and subverting familiarity, Fischer transforms design into a playful, at times unsettling and deeply humane experience, going beyond simply occupying space, questioning it, augmenting it. Seen collectively, these seem to proffer Fischer’s broader design philosophy: functionality is never abandoned, but it is never allowed to dominate. Instead, chairs become narrative devices, lamps become sculptural characters and tables adopt theatrical presence. Each object resists closure, hovering between use and refusal, sculpture and utility.