Gagosian is pleased to announce Eugène Atget, an exhibition of new paintings by Urs Fischer, opening on June 9. This marks the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery in Athens.
Working across an extraordinary range of materials and techniques, Fischer explores themes of perception and representation, reinterpreting familiar images and objects. Using various technologies to process source material that includes historical motifs, he merges the real with the imagined. In Eugène Atget, the artist transforms the familiar interior of the neoclassical building at 22 Anapiron Polemou Street through a selection of urban landscapes that capture the experience of speed within a contemporary environment saturated with figures and faces, graphic elements, and text.
Combining silkscreen, hand painting, and stenciling, Fischer adopts a collage-like aesthetic—drawing inspiration from artists ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Cady Noland—in his own interpretations of Los Angeles, the city he now calls home. He creates layered compositions by placing original photographs above and beneath found and manipulated images, merging representation and abstraction to evoke the city’s overwhelming sensory intensity.
The exhibition’s title refers to the influential French photographer Eugène Atget, who sought to document the rapidly disappearing urban landscape of “Old Paris” in the early twentieth century through a distinctly documentary approach. Focusing on architecture that predated the French Revolution, Atget used his camera to create a multilayered historical archive rather than a series of isolated, stylized images. In his 1931 essay A Short History of Photography, Walter Benjamin emphasized the enduring significance of this project, describing Atget as a pioneer of fragmentation who liberated photography from the conventions of nineteenth-century photographic practice.
Turning his gaze toward the endless “film strip” of Los Angeles and toward “places not made to be looked at,” Fischer approaches a magnificently chaotic palimpsest of images, signs, and textures with a similar sensibility.
The large-scale works featured in the exhibition often employ a panoramic perspective; some have also been positioned to engage in dialogue with views of the surrounding streets and park visible through the gallery’s expansive windows. Combining elements drawn from print and digital advertising with original smartphone photographs—freeways, cars, buildings, and people—Fischer’s new paintings form a body of partly improvised visual and thematic compositions that seem to continue where Atget’s foundational project of urban documentation left off.
As gallerist Jeffrey Deitch has observed: “Artists, writers, and filmmakers who are not from Los Angeles often create the most perceptive portrayals of the city. As Urs Fischer looks out the window of a moving car, he captures and translates into painting what may be the most eloquent depiction of contemporary Los Angeles today.”
URS FISCHER
Eugène Atget
June 9–September 12, 2026
Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 9, 6–9 PM
Gagosian Athens
22 Anapiron Polemou Street
Athens, Greece
