Urs Fischer

Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery
© Urs Fischer 

Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, YES., April - August 2013 (clay form exhibited)
New York, Gagosian Gallery, mermaid / pig / bro w/hat, April - May 2014 (another example exhibited)

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no apparent condition issues with this work. Please note Edition 1 and the AP of this work are functioning fountains. The purchaser of this lot has the option to have the sculpture converted into a fountain by the artist, at the purchaser's sole discretion. Please contact Sotheby's Contemporary Art Department for further information.
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Edition 1 and the AP of this work are functioning fountains. The purchaser of this lot has the option to have the sculpture converted into a fountain by the artist, at the purchaser's sole discretion. Please contact Sotheby's Contemporary Art Department for further information.


Urs Fischer’s cast bronze sculpture, referentially titled Pietà, resembles a large, partially-formed mountain of malleable earth, which swells almost to human scale. Rising from the uneven terrain of the figure's sloped sides, we can make out a skeletal arm and a single, grasping hand. The rest of the piece devolves into sensuous rises and falls of the form's original clay material, the haptic impression of fingerprints stroking across the surface of the shape, with cracks and divets striking through the roughly-hewn human figure.

The Swiss-born Fischer has made his mark on the contemporary art landscape by subverting it—at times tearing it quite literally apart. Showing his work internationally since the mid-1990s, Fischer's artistic career is difficult to summarize—and often, to conserve. Working largely in sculptural forms, Fischer refuses to cohere to the expectations of traditional sculpture at all, replacing lasting materials with ones that decay and decompose, crumble or melt away. His 2003 piece, What if the Phone Rings? features three female nudes, sculpted in wax and outfitted with candle wicks. When the work is presented for an exhibition, the wicks are lit, causing the women to slowly melt over the course of the show, leaving in their places large puddles of melted then hardened wax. His 2004-5 work, Bread House recreated a small Swiss chalet out of loaves of sourdough bread. In Untitled (Suspended Line of Fruit), Fischer's repeated use of real, perishable foods is echoed in the installation of pairs of halved apples, pears, pineapples, and oranges, hung in a single, decaying line. In 2007, Fischer transformed the space of dealer Gavin Brown's gallery by removing the concrete floor entirely, and digging into the layers of dirt beneath.

Fischer's interest in materials, transformation, completeness, and degradation is visible in Pietà. This sculpture comes out of his collaborative and interactive installation for his 2013 exhibition from MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, YES. Made in tandem with 1,500 volunteers in an open-source installation within his larger retrospective exhibition, Fischer’s YES invited others—students, artists, amateurs, and professionals alike—to mold huge quantities of clay into figurative forms of assorted scales. The result is something of a sculptural junkyard, as the usually pristine space takes on the look of an abandoned ceramics studio, with its clay-formed inhabitants in various states of completion and order. The unfired clay forms filled the Geffen’s expansive space, with messy scraps of drying clay and unformed blocks of the material littering the floor and creeping onto white walls.

Among these figures and bits of clay emerged some recognizable figures—a sculptural recreation of da Vinci's The Last Supper, hewn in heavy clay, an attempt at Rodin's The Thinker sitting atop a pile of clay scraps, and a rather surreal anthropomorphic horse posing in pin-up fashion on the floor. Within the earthy rubble, one could find the grotesque Pietà. Named for Michelangelo's famous figure of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ, Fischer's version, cast here in unpainted bronze, monumentalizes this clay sketch in a far more permanent material.

Naturally, Fischer's Pietà calls forth the image of Michelangelo's famed monument to motherly love, sacrifice, and sorrow. Made in the fifteenth century, Michelangelo's masterful depiction of the Virgin Mary is rendered in gleaming marble. In Michelangelo's manifestation of this moment of mourning, Mary's youthful face turns down towards the lifeless body of her son, one hand gripping his side as he lays draped across her lap, and the other turning simply upward, toward heaven. While Michelangelo's version is more complete—the folds of Mary's massive robes carefully curved, the muscles of Christ's body exquisitely carved—Fischer's imitates this original in its pyramidal shape. Fischer's rough, hand-shaped form also recalls Willem de Kooning's Woman, I (1950-52). This "hulking, wild-eyed figure" in de Kooning's painting depicts an ambiguously female form in dull greys and bright flashes of flesh. The look and feel of de Kooning's Woman, I—its unsentimental depiction of the female figure, its almost monstrous visage, its ample proportions—imply both strength and repulsion. Both of these traits are echoed in Fischer's Pietà, which recasts Michelangelo's ethereal figure in a more base visual vocabulary, Mary's contorted face here perhaps serving as a more realistic representation of agony and loss.

Refusing both permanence and beauty—in a 2009 profile of the artist, the New Yorker branded him "The Imperfectionist"—Fischer engages in the fertile ground of material decay, and the very human territory of degradation. This editioned Pietà, though cast in a lasting bronze, contains within it traces of the provisional, collaborative, rudimentary, and base approaches that the artist brings to his work.