Oct 9, 2011

Urs Fischer


“Beautiful sculptures made out of what? Wax! Artist Urs Fischer ‘s installment of wax figures will be at the Arsenale Complex for this year’s Venice Biennale. His work includes a melting man standing and gazing upon a statue: Giovanni Bologna’s 16th Century “The Rape of the Sabine Women”. Throughout the show, the wax figures slowly fall apart…limb by limb.” (On view until November 2011)











“An engineer of imaginary worlds, in the past Urs Fischer has created sculptures in a rich variety of materials including unstable substances such as melting wax and rotting vegetables. In a continuous search for new plastic solutions, Fischer has built houses out of bread and given life to animated puppets; he has dissected objects or blown them out of proportion in order to reinvent our relationship to them. In 2007, in a now-legendary exhibition, he excavated the floor of his New York gallery, digging a crater within the exhibition space.

Throughout his work, with ambitious gestures and irreverent panache, Fischer explores the secret mechanisms of perception, combining a Pop immediacy with a neo-Baroque taste for the absurd.”

(An excerpt from The New Museum,2009)