Peter Brant displays Urs Fischer

Trompe l’oeil wallpaper created to replicate collector Peter Brant’s living room is a prominent feature in Urs Fischer’s solo exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center. Abstract Slavery is the name of the installation, and perhaps a theme for Brant’s life, whose White Birch Paper Company and a marriage both ran aground. The melting of self, ego, and perhaps the fleeting nature of life, are personified by a wax statue of Brant in every room, with wicks lit. “I look like John F. Kennedy after he was shot,” said Brant. “I like the way it melts and turns into an abstraction. Normally, I don’t like how I look in pictures.” In addition to the trompe l’oeil and wax figures, there’s Warhol-esque mirrored boxes and a huge pit dug into the floor and filled with stones and dirt, You. “The work is about deconstruction, about where the art world has gone,” said Brant, who has been collecting since he was 19. “And it is You because that’s where you are going to end up one day." The exhibition, called Oscar the Grouch, is a culmination of three years of work between Brant and Fischer and runs through February 2011.