Urs Fischer

In Untitled (Bread House) (2004-2005), Fischer constructed a Swiss style chalet out of loaves of bread. His Bad Timing, Lamb Chop! (2004-2005), displays a giant wooden chair (actually cast aluminium) intersecting a half-empty packet of cigarettes dramatically increased in scale.

Between 2005 and 2006, he created Untitled (Lamp/Bear), an edition of three 23-foot-tall, 20-ton, bronze bears (two are yellow, the third is blue) intersected with generic functional lamps that appear to spring out of their heads;[2] in 2011, one of the pieces was displayed for five months at Seagram Building's plaza before being auctioned at Christie's and is currently displayed at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar.[7][8] The blue version, affectionately known as "Blueno," was installed at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from 2016 to 2020.[9][10][11]

In his series Problem Paintings, the artist juxtaposes headshots of old Hollywood movie stars, with silkscreened pictures of either fruit or hardware.[12]

For his 2007 show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York, Fischer excavated the gallery's main room, bringing in contractors to dig an eight-foot hole where the floor had been, and calling the result You.[1] The work was described by art critic Jerry Saltz as “experimentally rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction.”[13]

In Death of a Moment (2007), two entire walls are equipped with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and set in motion by a hydraulic system, to create the surreal effect of a room in flux, morphing in shape and size.[14]

In 2010, Fischer released a publication with fellow artist Darren Bader, titled The Bearded Island / The Artists Lament. The publication was a parallel project to the 2009 group exhibition “Remembering Henry’s Show” at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. The text is a close examination of the fear and obsessions that pervade the life of an artist, set against a series of images.[3]

In 2018, he conceived PLAY, a room-size exhibit combining choreography and sculpture in which audience members can interact with office chairs equipped with motion sensors and motors that move on their own and react to the actions of participants in the gallery.[15]

Fischer’s wax sculptures have become iconic of the artist’s practice. Fischer began making wax sculptures in the early 2000s, resulting in anonymous and crudely cut female forms. Today, his wax sculptures are refined portraits of significant art world figures that are lit like candles and melted over the duration of an exhibition. The wax works are almost exclusively sculptural portraits of human subjects, and the process of melting lends itself to contemplation of existentialism and the ultimate meaning of art and it’s legacy.[3]

In 2011, Fischer created a to-scale wax reproduction of The Rape of the Sabine Women by Flemish-Italian sculptor Giambologna for the Venice Biennale. The sculpture was produced at the Swiss foundry, The Kunstgiesserei. Giambologna's original work in the Piazza della Signoria was digitzed using an optical scanner, and the image was used to create a 3D model in polyurethane foam. A negative was made from the foam model, and filled with wax that was pigmented to imitate the effect of marble. A wick system was developed to allow the work, Untitled 2011, to melt like a candle for the duration of the Biennale. The exhibition included another wax sculpture of Fischer’s friend and fellow artist Rudolf Stringel and a wax creation of Fischer’s own office chair.[16] The work was described as a highlight of the Venice Biennale by Vault magazine.[6]

Francesco 2017 is a four-metre tall wax sculpture of the Italian curator Francesco Bonami, a close personal friend of the artist. The National Gallery of Australia acquired Francesco in 2018, the first acquisition under the leadership of new Director Nick Mitzevich.[17] It is the first work of Fischer’s to be accessioned into a collection in the southern hemisphere.[6]

Urs Fischer's Francesco 2017 on display at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, April 2019.

Francesco 2017 depicts Bonami atop an open refrigerator stacked with fruit and vegetables. The refrigerator acts as a plinth, a satire of sculpture’s elevation of important men on marble plinths. The figure stares at his smartphone, in a position “emblematic of our era”.[4] The melting wax and fruit and vegetables in the fridge are a reference to memento mori of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, where motifs such as food, candles, hourglasses and skulls are utilised as a reminder of mortality.[18] The artist sets no strict parameters for the burning of the sculpture. Wicks are inserted at various locations on the work; all the wicks can be lit at once to accelerate the process or the life of the work can be extended by limiting the number of wicks lit at once. The work can be lit continuously or sporadically. Once the figure has melted completely, the remains will be returned to the Swiss foundry where it was made to be recast and returned to the museum for the next installation.[6]

Mitzevich described the acquisition to The Australian as “[embodying] what this generation of art is about”.[17] In another interview with the Canberra Times, Mitzevich says that the sculpture demonstrates that contemporary art “is not static, it is alive and always changing, reflecting the world in which we live”.[19]

Fischer has his own publishing imprint, Kiito-San, whose books are distributed by DAP[20] and Buchhandlung Walther König. The imprint has published exhibition catalogues by Fischer as well as books on the work of Spencer Sweeney, Peter Regli, and Darren Bader. In 2015 Kiito-San released a cookbook called Cooking for Artists, written by Mina Stone, who cooks lunch at Fischer's studio.

Fischer's current studio occupies a large warehouse in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, near the waterfront.[1]