“Fischer’s wizardly ability to present objects on the brink of falling apart, floating away or undergoing psychic transformation, and his forceful feel for chaos, carnality and materiality, make him, for me, one of the most imaginative powerhouses we have.”
W ith Adam, Urs Fischer skillfully merges elements of high and low culture while subverting the long established traditions of sculpture. By creating a life-size wax figure of a real person—artist Adam McEwen—Fischer takes a technique associated to the pop culture wax museums and elevates its very nature to a conceptual breakthrough in the history of sculpture. The figure stands preoccupied, his posture slouched, his hands tucked in his jeans, and his gaze downcast, yet his slightly raised left shoulder, open chest, and extended left foot create a charming contrapposto which seems to invite engagement. He seems suspended in a moment of contemplation or of anticipation, as if the actions of the observer might elicit a long awaited response.
Departing from the classical use of stone or bronze, with wax Fischer introduces a material typically associated with ephemerality and impermanence—something in stark contrast to the enduring nature of traditional media. Wax was also historically reserved only for the preparatory stages of sculpture making, making Fischer's choice of materiality a profound defiance of what sculpture can be. Long black wicks embedded in the depression at the top of Adam’s head reveal that he is not only a sculpture, but a candle—destined to be lit and melt down. The ignition of the wick sets off a transformative process by which the work gradually loses its shape until all sense of form has been lost and it is reduced into a uniform mass, only to be recast and repainted by the studio, presumably to be lit again, in an ongoing cycle of destruction and reconstruction. In so doing, Fischer's Adam radically blurrs the liminal spaces between sculpture, installation and performance—its deeper meaning embedded moreso in it's cylces of ongoing metamorphosis than in any of its basic formal qualities.
“The only interesting thing about art…is what one does over one’s entire life, and the chance that art can travel in t.mes … I’m talking about the efficiency of certain works, in what they do to your perception of the world.”
The candle has long been used throughout the canon of art history as a vanitas or memento mori, reflecting the passage of t.mes and the fragility of existence. The dual nature of light and of fire embody the cyclical nature of life, death, and renewal at work in Fischer's candle series. For the 54th edition of Venice Biennale, Fischer presented a replica of Giambologna’s 16th-century sculpture The Rape of the Sabine Women (1579-1582), melting the wax cast of the mannerist masterwork over the course of several months. Throughout the duration of the melt, the women became increasingly contorted and disfigured, until no semblance of their identity remained—a foil to the five-hundred year old original work which still stands in the Loggia della Signoria in Florence.
