Andi Fischer - REGEN - FÄNGER DA, 2021

The title is half instruction, half announcement: Regen – Fänger Da. Rain
– Catcher There. The compound is Fischer’s own invention, a German portmanteau
that does not quite exist in the dictionary — a person or device that catches
rain, stationed in a specific place, present and ready. The figure in the
painting is exactly that. Tall, grey, stick-limbed, wearing what appears to be
a wide-brimmed hat, he stands in the centre of the canvas holding a tool or rod
at shoulder height, a small grey bird perched on one end of it. The face is
minimal: two dark dots for eyes, a nose line, a long red line for a mouth
turned neither up nor down, suggesting neither joy nor sorrow but simply
presence. He is there, occupying his place in the world, performing his function.

Around him, a complete cosmology is arrayed with the confident economy of
a child’s first drawing of everything important. Above, on the left, a rain
cloud — two blue scribbled masses leaking vertical strokes of rain downward. On
the right, a sun rendered in thick yellow oil stick: a rough circle with
radiating strokes, generous and immediate. In the lower left, a house: a red
triangular roof over a red rectangular base, beside a small yellow bell or
vessel. At the edges, green grass and dark foliage frame the scene. The white
of the primed canvas is left to breathe everywhere, giving the composition its
extraordinary openness — Fischer always leaves margins blank, a decision he
considers essential to keeping the works and the events within them open.

The paradox is immediate and deliberate. These are not a child’s marks.
They are made with oil sticks — compressed oil paint mixed with mineral wax,
the medium first developed for Pablo Picasso — applied directly onto canvas
without brush or palette, in an act Fischer describes as requiring “spontaneity
and speed” as its core. The apparent simplicity of each element is the product
of sustained formal intelligence: the specific red of the mouth that neither
smiles nor frowns; the grey of the figure that reads simultaneously as
clothing, as rain, as the material of the figure itself; the precise placement
of the sun and cloud that divides the sky into competing weather systems
without resolving which will prevail. Fischer does not simplify. He distils.

Regen – Fänger Da in the Context of Fischer’s
Practice

Andi Fischer (b. 1987, Nuremberg, Germany; lives and works in Berlin)
graduated from the Universität der Künste in Berlin in 2018, receiving the
prestigious TOY Berlin Masters Award — an institutional recognition of
exceptional graduating talent that marked the speed with which his practice had
been taken seriously at the highest level of the German art system. He is
represented by Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf — one of Germany’s most internationally
respected contemporary galleries, with a history of exhibiting artists
including Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo, Jonathan Meese, and
Sophie von Hellermann — and also by Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen; Larsen
Warner, Stockholm; Kewenig, Palma de Mallorca; and Gallery Baton, Seoul. His
work has been presented at Frieze London. This is a gallery and fair network
that places Fischer squarely within the most seriously regarded tier of
European contemporary painting.

The visual language Fischer deploys in his paintings and drawings draws
on a lineage that he approaches with full historical consciousness: the naive
and the expressive, Art Brut and the Outsider tradition, the child’s drawing as
a form of radical honesty about what an image needs to be. But his intellectual
framework is deeply art-historical. His works return repeatedly to Albrecht
Dürer — whom Fischer shares a birthplace with — to Rubens, to Cranach, to the
hunting scene, the battle of man and animal, the Baroque history painting. In
each case, he applies what his gallery describes as a “deskilling process” that
is actually a reskilling: he isolates the irreducible kernel of what the image
means — the eagle, the figure, the liver; the hunter, the hunted, the weapon —
and renders it in a visual language stripped of all the apparatus of
legitimation that academic painting uses to tell us how to feel. The result, as
a critic has observed, is that “in the imperfect painterly gesture the human
being’s complexity is concealed.”

In Regen – Fänger Da, the art-historical echo is Cranach’s Golden
Age — the idyllic paradise painting in which figures inhabit a world of
peaceful coexistence, where the weather is clement, the land is abundant, and
human need is met without conflict. Fischer’s rain catcher does not inhabit
that paradise; he stands between the rain and the sun, neither one thing nor
the other, performing the modest labour of preparedness. One of Fischer’s
gallery texts notes that “without being understated, Fischer offers here a
utopia that is neither naïve nor too short-sighted — grounded in careful
reflection and deeply anchored in collective cultural memory.” This painting is
that utopia in its domestic, quotidian register: not the Golden Age itself, but
the ordinary person readying themselves for whatever comes.

The Case for Acquiring Regen – Fänger Da for the
Black Square Collection

Fischer’s collection profile is one of the most significant markers of
his standing. His works are held in the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza
Collection, Madrid; the Burger Collection in Hong Kong, one of the world’s most
important private collections of contemporary art; the Fundación AMMA in Mexico
City; and the Hildebrand Collection in Leipzig. This is a collection profile
that places him among the most seriously regarded painters of his generation in
Europe.

The international exhibition circuit confirms that assessment. He has
shown at Sies + Höke, Kewenig (Palma de Mallorca), Avlskarl (Copenhagen),
Larsen Warner (Stockholm), Gallery Baton (Seoul), Yee Society (Hong Kong), and
Frieze London. He has been included in institutional group exhibitions at
Casino Luxembourg and Kunstverein Friedrichshafen. He has been covered in ART
– Das Kunstmagazin, Monopol, F.A.Z. Quarterly, and AD
Magazin, and featured on artnet news. The critical framing is consistent
across all these contexts: a painter who works in the tradition of deliberate
naïveté — alongside Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Carroll Dunham, and the broader
lineage of artists who have used the child’s visual vocabulary as a vehicle for
complex thought — but whose particular contribution is the sustained and
serious engagement with the Western art-historical canon as its source
material.

For Black Square, Regen – Fänger Da is a work of exceptional
presence that holds its own at the scale at which Fischer typically works — 180
× 140 cm, a canvas large enough to make the figure monumental and the
composition fully architectonic. It was made in 2021, a pivotal year in Fischer’s
exhibition history, and comes directly from Sies + Höke, the artist’s primary
gallery. The artist’s own frame — a consistent formal element across Fischer’s
production, part of his ongoing interrogation of how art is institutionally
framed and presented — is included, making this a complete object in the
fullest sense of the term. The rain catcher stands in his field, between the
weather systems, with his grey bird and his simple tool, waiting. It is an
image of extraordinary calm dignity, and of painting at its most necessary.

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Sies
+ Höke. Exhibition texts: ER DACHTE ALLES 3 (2019); Andi Fischer (2022); Enorm
viele Vögel fliegen (2025). Düsseldorf.

Kewenig.
“Andi Fischer: TATA! FALLING GOOD.” In collaboration with Sies + Höke, Palma de
Mallorca, 2023.

Ocula.
Andi Fischer artist profile, 2024. (Collections: Blanca and Borja
Thyssen-Bornemisza; Burger Collection; Fundación AMMA; Hildebrand Collection.)

Monopol.
“TOY Berlin Masters Award — Andi Fischer extrem gut schlechte Zeichnungen.”
September 2018.