URBAN ART : The Artist’s New Clothes

The man People magazine dubbed the The Windy City Warhol has blown into town, hoping to take L.A. by storm. Chicago’s Robert Fischer, best known for painting sultry female faces and abstractions thereof on jackets and other clothing, painted two naked models to match his painted couches and chairs for the Pacific Design Center’s annual designer show in March (Fischer is no stranger to the epidermal medium--nude, zebra-painted female tap-dancers were a top draw during his performance-art days.) The next week, he had his first major local showing at the Media District Studios in Glendale, a four-day venue that featured Fischer’s newest works; sculpted rugs and painted jackets, coats and furniture.

Not that he didn’t have quite an L.A. following already. In 1986, he became the first artist from outside California to be featured at Spago. Michael Jackson, Madonna, Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall all sport Fischer’s portraited clothing.

The first of his pop-art visages debuted eight years ago on the back of a jacket owned by his teen-age son, Aaron. “I’d never painted on clothing before,” says Fischer, 43, “but he looked boring and I thought it would help him meet girls.”

Within a few years, a Fischer face--in this case, the “Blue Zebra,” his lithograph of Tallulah Bankhead and Cecil Beaton at El Morocco in the 1930s--was hanging in the National Gallery of Art. Since then, he’s Fischerized celebrities from Elvis to Harpo Marx on anything from clothing to canvas.

Fischer couldn’t be happier about his Southern California welcome. “Chicago has a very sophisticated art community, but this is where I belong. I’m a pop junkie and L.A. is the seat of that culture.”

Now living in North Hollywood, he’s already sporting his first tattoo (a gift from his wife, Paula), and there’s a new wrinkle in Fischer’s painted

clothing line: Apparel with an abstract painting of the wearer’s psychic energy as determined by a channeler.

Welcome home, Mr. Fischer.