Zurich-based artist Gina Fischli had her first solo show, “Deep Water,” with Soft Opening in 2021, having signed on with the London gallery in 2019, only a year after earning her MFA at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Now she’s back with her latest exhibition, “Love Love Love.”
A parade of urban animals—poodles, pugs, rabbits, rats, and foxes—prowls around a catwalk. Each seems to occupy an identity between puppet and individualized living being, and each has its own first name (which serves as each artwork’s title) including John, David, Ruth, and Agatha. By elevating the sculptures on a platform, Fischli creates an intense encounter between viewer and artwork. The largest of the sculptures, which are made from wire, plaster, and fabric, stands at over a meter tall. Some wear almost-human outfits, suggesting the way that we anthropomorphize animals when we make them our pets.
Gina Fischli, Arabella (2024). Photo by Tom Carter, courtesy of the artist and Soft Opening.
The exhibition examines humans’ relationship with animals, both domestic and wild, with the gallery describing in the press release how “the treatment humans extend towards domestic pets via overbreeding, styling and accessorizing evidences a conflation of love, care and control.” Soft Opening also says that “the parallels between these common attitudes towards animals and the purpose we give to the arts are uncanny,” referencing the pageantry of the commercial art world, and saying that this exhibition is the “story of pets, the story of art—and of us.”
Fischli (b. 1989) lives and works in Zurich. She has previously had solo and two-person exhibitions in Paris, New York, Riga, Amsterdam, Zurich, and Berlin.
Gina Fischli, “Love Love Love” (2024). Photo by Tom Carter, courtesy of the artist and Soft Opening.
Founded by Antonia Marsh, Soft Opening represents 12 UK-based and international emerging artists. The gallery’s first opened in 2018 in Piccadilly Circus underground station and they then moved a year later to Minerva Street in East London. The gallery published the monograph Good Service in 2022.