Three years after the New Museum presented an immersive installation entitled “Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty,” the Museum for Contemporay Arts (MOCA) in Los Angeles opens the largest American retrospective of the New York-based Swiss artist. Fischer’s practice explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd and a Duchampian fearlessness. This comprehensive mid-career survey, curated by Tate Modern’s Jessica Morgan, is presented at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location and the Geffen Contemporary, both of which will bear a distinct approach to the unique spaces of each venue. In Fischer’s uncanny environment, bread sculptures rub shoulders with teddy bears, melting wax stands along rotten vegetables, skeletons meet movie stars and toys greet grave-like holes. While he famously excavated the floor of the New York gallery Gavin Brown Enterprise in order to dig a crater within the exhibition space in 2007, Fischer’s gigantic clay installation at MOCA was formed on-site by some 1,500 pre-registered visitors who visited the museum in the weeks preceding the opening and sculpted humorous domestic animals, ironic figurines or futuristic landscapes. Twisting and expanding our visions of reality, Fischer’s world is alterable and unexpected, and the pleasure that his sculptures and installations provide seems to be based on our attraction and simultaneous repulsion to the dreamlike appearances that he constructs. (Martha Kirszenbaum)

Urs Fischer’s solo show at MOCA (Los Angeles) will run through August 19.