Urs Fischer’s Melting Sculptures on Display at Bourse de Commerce in Paris

Urs Fischer’s creative oeuvre is characterized by movement, mutability, and flux. 

Everything is seemingly normal until one realizes that these are no ordinary sculptures—they're candles.

Fischer’s large-scale installations and sculptures posit genres traditionally evoked in painting – portraits, landscapes, nudes, and still lifes – in a profusion of rich and often impermanent sculptural materials.

Fischer began to make his candle sculptures in the early 2000s with a series of crudely rendered female nudes, standing upright or lounging in groups. 

In 2011 he set the art world on fire—literally—with his melting wax figures installation at the Venice Biennale. 

A series of realistic figurative candle portraits followed, including a full-size replica of Giambologna’s sixteenth-century sculpture the rape of the sabine women, and Marsupiale (Fabrizio) in 2017, which portrays the florentine antique dealer Fabrizio Moretti merged with an oversize bust of saint Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners. 

In 2018, Fischer created a candle replica of the art patron and collector Dasha Zhukova, which burned for weeks in the shopfront gallery at Gagosian davies street in London.

Now, his melting sculptures are on view once more—this time at the Bourse de Commerce. Fischer's installation Untitled has found a new home in what was once a place to negotiate the trade of grain and other goods.

His penchant for delicate materials like clay or wax allows him, for example, to produce unusual candle sculptures, which in the course of the exhibition change from realistic to formless, from definite to random, and from vertical to horizontal. 

At the beginning of the installation, each candle is lit. At that point, they're left to burn as long as the wick lasts. In a sort of performance, the installation evolves as each piece slowly melts away. It's a fascinating meditation on the passage of time as each sculpture marches toward a destiny of disintegration. Over time, the installation evolves from realism toward abstraction in a sort of memento mori. 

Currently, the wicks are lit and the entire installation—or its liquified remains—will be on view until December 31, 2021.

Urs Fischer was born in 1973. He lives and works between New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and his hometown of Zurich, Switzerland. An irreverent artist, he creates an absurd and ironic, eclectic and unpredictable world that questions our way of thinking about space. 

In order to explore the infinite possibilities of matter and to work on the temporality of his pieces, Fischer likes to employ mutable materials that burn, expire or change like bread or wax, and takes an interest in everyday objects.