Urs Fischer

Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Zurich, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Urs Fischer, May - June 2006

This work is in very good condition overall. The surface is clean and fresh. There are scattered small surface accretions on the artist's frames. Otherwise there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
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Urs Fischer's oeuvre is characterized by a morbid glamour. Its references range from the historical and political to the humorous and awkward. The present work which dates from 2006 is a prototypical example of the artist's flirtation with the realm of the bazaar. A meditation on surrealism, May Yohe & Putnam Strong, Zero Year Curse, Tavernier Blue, Hope Diamond, The Heart of the Ocean is a mélange of motifs from Fischer's most renowned sculptures. In the second panel, the central focus is the burning candle, one of the artist's most favored themes. Fischer has done much experimentation with this vanitas symbol and its ability to take on different forms. Most recently in the Arsenale at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the artist re-created Giambologna's illustrious Rape of the Sabine Women in a 1:1 ratio made entirely out of wax. The rapidly decomposing material added an element of degradation and decay to the usually polished and pristine marble structure.

There is an element of surrealism in the artist's work. Vaguely reminiscent of a de Chirico in its seemingly non-sensical parallels and juxtapositions, the present work places a tomb stone mourning the loss of famous story book heroes on an unmade bed, an Oyster card reader in the bathtub, and the faces of what appear to be our founding fathers in the living room atop a clothing rack. In an interview with Darren Bader in 2008, Fischer explains, "two objects that are often in close proximity to each other...I started to think about how they might occupy the same space: just a meeting of a lighter and a table, without the hierarchies of how we're used to perceiving them." Darren Bader describes it as "the way that distinct objects or bodies are woven around each other, almost like muscle is 'woven' around a bone." In the same vein as Salvator Dali, Fischer plays with the idea of dislocated body parts in many of his sculptures, particularly focusing on the idea of the hands or other limbs floating in space. The first panel of May Yohe & Putnam Strong, Zero Year Curse, Tavernier Blue, Hope Diamond, The Heart of the Ocean echoes this motif which is illustrated in some of his most famous works like Untitled (Holes) (2006) and ? (2005).

May Yohe & Putnam Strong, Zero Year Curse, Tavernier Blue, Hope Diamond, The Heart of the Ocean is a modern day gesamtkunstwerk. All-encompassing and comprehensive, Fischer's work is a vibrant mixture of the symbolic and the real. It fractures and digs at our everyday reality, generating a wide range of associations and forcing us into "... a situation that brings together people, objects, and space in a dizzy, bottomless, uncontrollable interaction, which is magical and uplifting in its immateriality, but also disturbing." (Bice Curiger, "Spaces Generated by Vision or Basements Save Windows," in Urs Fischer and Alex Zachery (eds.), Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 15).