Urs Fischer Creates Incredible Life-Size Candles in Human Forms

If you initially lay your eyes on the life-size sculptures created by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, you may draw some comparison with the marble sculptures found in a Roman art gallery. However, what is surprising is these big sculptures are actually candles with wicks and all!

And what does Fischer do with his wax sculptures? He lights them up like a candle, right at the beginning of an installation, and leaves them to burn as long as the wicks last! The end result is wax sculptures without heads, limbs, and other parts that turn into streams of solidified wax. It is certainly fascinating to watch the sculpture ‘evolve’, so to say, in ways that just cannot be anticipated.

Fischer is one of the unique sculptors, who has gained fame for his melting wax figures that he installs infamous public places. His initial installations were at the Venice Biennale, but now they are once more on view at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, France. This is a new museum in Paris, founded by the French businessman François Pinault, and houses Fischer’s installation ‘Untitled’.

The large size of this sculpture is appropriate for the space – a public square – covered with a dome and reaches almost 40 meters (131 feet) in height. According to thiscolossal.com, someone has described it in a statement, thus, “monument to impermanence, transformation, the passage of time, metamorphosis, and creative destruction.”

He has also recreated Giambologna’s late 16th Century sculpture ‘Abduction of the Sabine Women’. This sculpture, displayed in a Rotunda, is surrounded by seven chairs, four of which are molded after the seats from Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia. The others include an airline bench, a rolling office chair, and a common garden seat. These depict the ongoing effects of colonization and globalization.

According to ignant.com, a statement from the gallery explains this sculpture, thus, “Before being lit, this ensemble of candles encapsulates mastery, realism, verticality, and virtuosity but over the course of the exhibition, as the candles burn, these values are inverted by the workings of chance and entropy: the sculpture becomes informal, even formless.”

Fischer, whose hometown is Zurich, Switzerland, lives, and works between his hometown, New York, Los Angles, and Berlin. His works, such as ‘Dancing with Myself’, ‘The World Belongs to You’, ‘Mapping the Studio’, and others, have been displayed in Palazzo Grassi, located on the grand canal of Venice, Italy.