Fusing Sculpture and Painting, Urs Fischer Makes 3D Still Lifes that Melt

Urs Fischer creates tiny, hand-painted sculptures for his ‘Small Axe' show.

August 20, 2016, 12:15pm

Urs Fischer's Small Axe (Installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2016). Images courtesy the artist

To be heard, especially in the art world, it’s often necessary to provoke or subvert—to become, for lack of a better term, an avant-garde provocateur. Regularly called “subversive” and “neo-Dada,” Swiss-born but New York-based artist Urs Fischer doesn’t concern himself with such labels or ideas. For him, making art is about breaking through the noise and capturing someone’s attention.

Fischer tells The Creators Project, “If you think about an image, not even art, there are always different qualities to it. Anything that works needs to get your attention or state its own place, so you can see it as subversion or not — it doesn’t actually matter.”

In his latest show, Small Axe, now on at Garage Contemporary Museum of Art in Moscow, Fischer catches viewers' attention by pairing small sculptures with the large and distinct architectural space of the museum’s Central Gallery. Almost all of Fischer’s 20 sculptures are cast in bronze and hand-painted, from a miniature rat playing a grand piano to a wilted tulip in a vase. The works are designed to be the opposite of the seriousness and grandeur of Soviet Modernist architecture. Outside in Garage Square, Fischer has installed a collaborative project, where people are invited to create a landscape of clay sculptures that will grow and metamorphose through Small Axe’s run.

Fischer describes the space as not an "easy building." The structure holds a lot of history (formerly a restaurant in Gorky Park), and it has been fixed up in a certain way for a museum environment. Beyond the space, Fischer was thinking about art in Russia, both past and present, which he admittedly doesn’t fully understand. But these experiences in art, space, and history are funneled into Fischer’s point of view in Small Axe.

“There are not many walls in the space, so you can start to build walls, but I didn’t want to intervene in the architecture,” he adds. “The building was built to impress, so there is a lot of power to that. The architect, Rem Koolhaas, has a certain way of approaching space and openness, so for me it was all about finding my own space in all of that. So I chose to put a lot small sculptures within that space.”

For Fischer, placing larger sculptures within this space would have been problematic, since the space would have suffered from clutter.

“It would have been too many men in the room, too many heterosexual men in a room or something like that,” Fischer quips. “It would be too much testosterone. That’s why I chose this [alternate] path.”

One of the sculptures in the show is a polished chrome motorcycle helmet with a painted bronze snail on top. Its realization was — like several of the pieces in Small Axe— the outcome of stream-of-consciousness work. Fischer creates an interesting parallel between the protective “shells” of a helmet and that of a snail, creating a funny interplay between the vast differences in speed suggested by both objects.

True to Fischer’s goal of playing with scale, the sculpture of the rat playing the piano is noticeably small—it is about three inches tall and about five inches long. Fischer created the piece by doodling, sculpting it out of clay, then sending it off to be cast in bronze. Fischer describes the sculptures as very traditional, though the artist goes a step above by hand-painting all of the works with oil paint.

“In sculpture, most sculptures are not painted because of this thing about the honesty of material and all that,” says Fischer. “One way that I understand art is that you compete against reality. Let’s say you have a painting. You immerse yourself into a fiction right away. You look at a photograph and immediately you’re in Afghanistan. But with sculpture it’s always kind of in the way. It occupies a physical space and you compete against reality because you cannot immerse yourself in it in the same way.”

“A traditional bronze or marble sculpture has this materiality,” Fischer adds. “I’ve always liked painted sculptures because there is something weird about them because you fuse sculpture and painting. They become like little three-dimensional still lifes.”

This creative impulse led him to create a life-sized candle sculpture of international art collector Bruno Bischofberger and his wife, Yoyo, sitting in chairs. In these works, Fischer’s painting treatments have the explosive color of psychedelic Pop art. The piece is lighted every day and gradually melts over the duration of Small Axe. To create the Bruno and Yoyo candle sculpture, Fischer had each subject select their favorite chair from their extensive furniture collection, then 3D-scanned each person sitting down. Using the scan data, Fischer milled the sculpture from foam, then hand-carved parts of it to accentuate certain details. From there he worked on the colors and the casting.

Next up is YES, the collaborative clay project in Garage Square, with which Fischer wanted to create something democratic. He wanted people to be able to do what they wanted in building a collaborative sculpture. While Garage visitors have added to YES, it turns out that people just passing by have contributed to the sculpture.

“Everybody can do something — it’s not intimidating and it’s a lot of fun,” he says. “Also, it doesn’t last. The elements get to it, people stumble over it. It’s just a lot of joy and the opposite of what art-making is, where it’s you and it’s isolated. It destroys itself. Clay is taken out of the ground and it goes back into the ground.”