Why Does Urs Fischer Burn His Sculptures?

Over the decades of his career, Urs Fischer has worked with different materials and different art forms. However, his most famous works are the giant candles or wax sculptures of people, artworks, and furniture that would gradually melt during Fischer’s shows. Read on to learn more about Urs Fischer’s unconventional materials and his approach to the intended destruction of his art.

Urs Fischer is a contemporary artist born in Switzerland. Although art critics often label him a Conceptualist, he opposes this categorization, insisting that he starts his work from materials, not ideas. In his practice, he combines traditional crafts of carpentry and construction with conceptually new approaches, reinterpreting old meanings and memories.

One of Fischer’s main artistic preoccupations is materiality and its transformation. By colliding two unexpected objects or concepts together, Fischer explores the principle of duality, going beyond traditional pairings and associations. Transformation through decay is a common topic in Fischer’s art, reflected in his wax sculptures and other installations. In 2004, he constructed a Swiss chalet out of bread loaves, leaving it to rot in the gallery space and letting out birds to feed off it.

Many of Fischer’s works are interactive and require the viewers’ involvement, such as a plasticine copy of Rodin’s The Kiss where the audience was encouraged to reshape the sculpture the way they wanted to. Other works require a physical experience, focusing on textures and tactile approaches. Fischer’s obsession with the process of decay and decomposition, both physical and conceptual, reveals itself in the most obvious manner in his monumental wax sculptures that are essentially giant candles, created only to be entirely consumed by flames. For centuries, artists of various movements and forms used wax in their practices, yet Fischer went much further with it, making decomposition the final and crucial part of his artistic expression.

Wax in Sculpture

Wax as a sculptural material has a long history. Figures made out of beeswax were present in religious rituals in Ancient Egypt and maintained their importance in the Christian world. One of the advantages of wax was its relative ease of use. The sculptures were quick to make and, unlike most other sculptural materials, did not require significant physical effort for carving and shaping. However, this also made it non-durable and sensitive to temperature and external conditions. During the Renaissance, trained artists used wax to create anatomically correct models of human organs used for medical training. Sometimes, the casts were made directly from the diseased bodies, and sometimes, artists formed and painted injuries on a blank ‘healthy’ sample.

However, the widest application of wax in visual arts concerned not the finished work itself but its preliminary part. Artists usually used wax to create molds for bronze casts or models for marble carvings. From ancient sculptures to the modern Madame Tussauds museums, wax was praised for its ability to present a convincing effect on human skin. The famous Impressionist Edgar Degas created his Little Dancer of Fourteen Years from wax, decorated with human hair and a muslin skirt. He wanted to convey the most realistic impression possible. This sculpture was not a work of art per se, but Degas’ study on physiognomy and ‘degenerative’ traits in the human face and body.

One of the earliest instances of Fischer using wax for his works, the installation What of the Phone Rings, quickly became one of his most celebrated works. Several editions of it consisted of three nude female figures standing, seated, and lying on a couch, slowly melting into pools of skin-colored wax. The style in which the figures are rendered, as well as the seemingly disconnected title, refer to Pop Art and the women of Roy Lichtenstein, copied from comic books. However, the subject of a reclining nude also refers to the Renaissance tradition of the idealized feminine form.

In a way, the melting women of Urs Fischer represent a contemporary take on vanitas painting, a still life subgenre focused on demonstrating the impermanence of the human world and earthly pleasures. The images of female bodies, not real bodies, but their idealized, pop-cultural forms devoid of any humanity, are essentially nothing more than lumps of wax, revealing their essence while fulfilling their only purpose. At the same time, no number of repetitions could make every edition of What If the Phone Rings less unique in its momentary existence, inextricably tied to its moment of death. For every moment the viewer turns their head away from the installation, they lose a piece of experience, missing the sculptures’ momentary state that will never return.

More than a decade later, Urs Fischer addressed the idea of the female form in wax once again. This time the figure he represented was his friend, a Russian art collector and the founder of the Garage Museum in Moscow, Dasha Zhukova. According to Fischer, it was Zhukova who came up with the idea. Over his career, Fischer created wax sculptures of his famous friends or people from the art world, but all of them were men, so Dasha presented a challenge to him.

The technical process of creating Urs Fischer’s wax sculptures is incredibly complex and forces the artist to use the help of other professionals. His earlier works were cut from Styrofoam and then cast in wax, the crude effect of that technique is visible in the What if the Phone Rings installation. However, Fischer’s team uses scans and 3D printing to ensure maximal precision today. Inside sculptures, they hide additional candle wicks to guarantee that a work would melt completely, leaving no solid parts behind.

During the 2011 Venice Biennale, Urs Fischer’s work was presented in the Arsenal Complex in a show called ILLUMINATIONS. The artist presented a set of life-sized wax sculptures. The largest and the most dramatic one was the replica of the famous The Abduction of a Sabine Woman by Giambologna, the famous sculptor of the Italian Renaissance. Around the sculpture, six wax chairs were arranged in a random order. Fischer copied four of them from the Quai Branly museum collection, representing furniture typical for different regions of Africa, namely  Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia. The remaining two chairs were as unremarkable as possible—a simple office chair found in every homeware shop worldwide and an airplane seat. The only human figure, apart from the Giambologna sculpture, was the image of Rudolf Stingel, a close friend and collaborator of Urs Fischer.

The juxtaposition of artisan hand-made pieces from Africa with standardized, faceless, and universally familiar objects from the West highlighted the uniformity of the globalized world, eager to erase all differences to facilitate profit. The monumental sculpture, the pinnacle of a Western artistic tradition that absorbed the cruelty and prejudice of its environment, stood in the center, gradually losing its limbs and falling apart. As it turned out, the artificially appointed ‘ideal’ equals the same nothing as the objects created by colonized people which were for centuries seen as inferior. The figure of Rudolf Stinger watches the scene indifferently, knowing it would suffer the same fate as everything his wax eyes see.

A decade later, Urs Fischer repeated this artwork in Paris in a former Bourse de Commerce (Commodities Exchange) building, now owned by the Pinault Collection. The choice of location was far from random. During the colonial era, Bourse de Commerce played a crucial role in trading resources extracted from the French colonies. Its interior was decorated with scenes showing French colonization and intercontinental trade.

A melting candle is a dynamic and obvious marker of passing time, an irreversible process of decay devoid of its ugly side effects. Urs Fischer finds beauty in this destruction, as if regarding dripping wax as his collaboration with the eternal laws of nature, both scaring and mesmerizing the audience with its unpredictable and merciless determination. Fischer’s sculptures are only meant to last a short while, with their demise ingrained into every element. Their final, finished form equals their complete cessation to exist.