20260307
Start of my experiment on use of wax as sculpture
Melting something that is not graspable. Semi-translucent, warm, like a burning. Pour it and it becomes something — a figure based on demons from Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhist art. Sort of figurative, sort of abstract. You can hold it but you can't.
The candle melts it down and you pour it again. It kills and rebirths. I don't know what the demon captures yet.
Urs Fischer
They're lit at the start of an exhibition and slowly melt over weeks. The destruction is the piece.
Paraffin wax mixture, pigment, steel, wicks — 189 x 115 x 130 cm (74 7/16 x 45 1/4 x 51 3/16 in.)
“The sculpture of a man sat at a table, Untitled is a self-portrait in painted wax that slowly melts until the head falls off. At first realistic and then totally deformed—the head being set to inexorably fall on the table—, this somber self-representation evokes the artist's demise in the simplest expression of vanitas.”
“Without any glorification of the self, Urs Fischer's art tests the experience of time and memory. It is characterized by a mutable and fluid staging aimed at preventing any immobility of form or meaning. In this spirit of constant mutation, wax is Fischer's precarious material of choice and he repeatedly uses it in his realistic candle-sculptures: destined to be shapeless, they evolve from determined creation to accidental form.”
“Urs Fischer's sculpture Untitled was first shown by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition Madame Fisscher at Palazzo Grassi (2012).”
Source: Pinault Collection
How does he do it? And how does he preserve wax works?