Urs Fischer Wax Sculptures

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 Art 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 duration of the show, the wax figures slowly fall apart…limb by limb.

In late 2007, Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer took a jackhammer to Gavin Brown’s pristine white West Village floors. A gallerist has got to have a lot of faith in an artist to let him rip through the concrete, upend pipes, and fill the space with a huge open trench of dirt and debris. Faith is precisely what Gavin Brown has in the 35-year-old Fischer, who lives and works in New York and Zurich. On the heels of Fischer’s extraordinary hole-in-the-floor show, gallerist and artist teamed up again to co-curate “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery last May. The event was basically an experiment in outrage and orchestration, where the previous exhibition was minutely photographed and then turned into wallpaper to compete with a new set of paintings and sculptures. The project might sound convoluted, but Fischer’s work is overwhelmingly straightforward. He uses everyday materials like wax, fruit, dust, and chairs, and there is always a lingering feeling of loss and decay.

Urs Fischer’s website

•