Urs Fischer is an artist who comes to grips with things in a radical manner. If artists are equipped with the ability to make us experience the world in new ways and see it differently, then Fischer achieves this by digging into reality with particularly large claws.
B. Curiger, “Spaces Generated by Vision or Basements Save Windows,” Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 12
Urs Fischer’s rich and varied body of work tackles grand themes such as creative struggle, the brevity of life, and questioning the given experience around us with particular wit and clarity while simultaneously mastering the formal issues of materiality, mass, classic form, and equilibrium. His works can be comprised of massive gestures or, as in the present lot, extraordinary fragility and nuance. Fischer’s subjects tend to be of the everyday— the bodies, objects, and architecture we interact with daily and may take for granted—and he recomposes them in a way which provides a startling new perspective.
The present lot titled The Grass Munchers is an aluminum cast of the artist’s arms and hands with three wax casts of hands grasping on to his figure in gestures that seem to either support or pull him in different directions. “Hands, a traditional motif in the history of art and a frequent element in Fischer's oeuvre, appear in The Grass Munchers: a cast aluminum fragment of the artist's shoulders, arms, and hands is held, or pulled, by the wax casts of three hands. Depending on how one reads the work, the hands either carry the artist or simply grasp him in a stable relationship of reciprocal support,”
(V. Knoll, “Urs Fischer at Eva Presenhuber,” ArtForum, New York, December 2007, p. 368).
The present lot with the classic subject of the human body handled with intense realism and heavy symbolism echoes classic art historical concerns, but is handled in a way that is uniquely Urs Fischer.
There are no limits to Fischer’s perceptions and psychological penetration of our contemporary soul. His delight in acquiring knowledge via the senses can only be described as Baroque, focusing on reality throughout the 360 degrees of its compass. Large numbers of vanitas symbols, candles really burning, and vegetables actually rotting combine with horror and trash symbolism inspired by heavy metal and references to the work of Martin Kippenberger to address the widespread cultural phenomenon of pleasure in angst, the secret delight in terror. […] but unlike the German artist [Kippenberger], Fischer never provokes merely for the sake of provoking. In the morass of adolescent taste Fischer discovers possibilities for expanding art’s frame of reference, recognizing a rich and vital vein of imaginative potential. The imagination is the agent of Fischer’s realism and symbolism. […] His work reinstates the realistic and symbolic with compelling force—and at the cutting edge of current developments.
B. Curiger 2009, p. 16
In The Grass Munchers, Urs Fischer elegantly renders a fraction of the human body to great psychological effect. The reduction of the body to the hands distills the essence of the gesture, and brings our attention to the expressive quality of the hands—long a subject for artistic exploration and a particularly key image for Urs Fischer whose body of work has long referenced the body. “Fischer’s artistic practice is broad-based, far-reaching, sharply focused, raw clever and disarming. He applies a scalpel to the tissues of the exhibition world and indulges his love of anatomy, both real and symbolic. His early drawings already show him dissecting bodies, revealing skeletons, brains, intestines, and genitals, as well as showing fingers cut off and reattached incorrectly,” (B. Curiger, paces Generated by Vision or Basements Save Windows,” Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 15). The body and its potential for containing meaning have proven to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the artist to this day.
When flesh is still attached to bone in Fischer’s work, the body is placed under attack: it is melting, fractured, decapitated, and penetrated. Fischer’s bodies, despite (or perhaps because of) this incompletion and decay are contemporary, sexually charged fragments and capture in their pose the artist’s eye for the poignant brevity of an everyday gesture or the familiarity of an intuitive placement of arms or legs. With his various disembodied heads, arms, feet, and hands, as well as the extraordinary melting wax females, Fischer plunders the art historical trope of the partial figure, updating the legacy for our own time.
J. Morgan, “If You Build Your House on a Bed of Rotting Vegetables,” Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 46
Fischer’s contemporary take on realism and the formal qualities of this sculpture reference a wealth of brilliant moments in art history—from classical Greek sculpture up to Robert Gober’s contemporary fragmented legs. “Fischer incorporates finely orchestrated allusions to other artists and art into his works. Indeed at times his works seem to overflow with such references, as though the artist wished to test the Pavlovian responses of his audience. The references are shadowy conjurings rather than visual quotations or appropriations—a kind of momentary trompe l’oiel. Fischer has ranged widely in this regard. He has evoked Bruce Nauman in such sculptural elements as heads, hands, and a multitude of feet and has combined them with references to the loneliness of life in the studio,” (B. Curiger 2009, p. 13-14).
Fischer is openly indebted to a wide array of historical sources ranging from the centuries-old tradition of nature morte, the nineteenth-century sculptural trope of the partial figure, aspects of Surrealism, and even an engagement with the legacy of institutional critique (ambiguously emptied of politics). In addition he has a clear affinity with such individual figures as Franz West and Dieter Roth. As ever, however, Fischer employs a distancing effect to these legacies through the use of an “inappropriate” alteration of materials or method of production leaving the odd impression for the viewer of having been seduced by the effect—sexual, beautiful, macabre, or poignant—or referential allure only to have its verity tarnished by the hint of cynicism that appears to be at work refusing us (and him) the pleasure of comfortably settling into a familiar realm. It is as if Fischer applies the principles of the vanitas (another frequent theme in his work) to the history of art itself such as we grasp for the fruit we like it decays before our eyes.
J. Morgan, “If You Build Your House on a Bed of Rotting Vegetables,” Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, p. 44
While The Grass Munchers carries a bevy of art historical references within its fine form, it is a work that is uniquely Urs Fischer’s. The artist has proven that he is not just another member in the long line of art history, but an avant-garde player taking the practice and definition of art to new heights. As a self-taught artist he works without limits. In his critically acclaimed 2007 work You Fischer radically reframed the art viewer’s exhibition experience by literally removing the floor below them. The gallery’s floor was completely removed and dug up to create a pit in the earth—leaving the viewer with a literal absence. “Its symbolic power was so compelling that the critic Jerry Saltz was moved to write of a Herculean project…brimming with meaning and mojo.” On the one hand, he declared, You evoked the groundlessness of existence, naked fear, and many a phobia, but on the other, it also made a heavenly ecstasy a reality, as an “inversion machine” that “pulsates with erotic energy,” (B. Curiger 2009, p. 15). The poetic absence of You is echoed in the removed body parts in The Grass Munchers as is the concept of the extreme repositioning of the viewer. The title of the work brings to mind (among other things…) a bovine passive creature—perhaps a reference to the central cast figure who limply is pulled in different directions by outside hands. One could view this work as the artist telling us not to passively go through life accepting what is around us, being caught up in the to and fro of everyday. The artist again pulls the floor out from under us with this important sculpture.