In The Grass Munchers, 2007, Urs Fischer has moulded his own arms and clavicle in aluminium, imparting the result with sporadic additions of hair and pigments. Three wax hands, variably hued and disembodied, clench either side of the replicated upper body, seemingly supporting or pulling it in different directions. A traditional motif in the history of art and a frequent element in Fischer’s oeuvre, hands are here spatially disruptive and disturbing. Floating mid-air like loose claws, they invoke a sentiment of uncanniness that is proper to the vision of false limbs and damaged bodies. This corporeal scene, profoundly unnatural yet realistically rendered, brilliantly encapsulates the crux of the artist’s oeuvre, and echoes the idea that ‘when flesh is still attached to bone in Fischer’s work, the body is placed under attack: it is melting, fractured, decapitated, and penetrated’ (Jessica Morgan, ‘If You Build Your House on a Bed of Rotting Vegetables,’ Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 46). Enigmatic and open-ended, The Grass Munchers prescribes and even shuns a simple, complete narrative. In it, Fischer’s contemporary take on realism references a wealth of brilliant moments in art history, from classical Greek sculpture and ancient fragmented statuary, to Robert Gober’s loose, truncated legs.