Urs Fischer

Swiss artist Urs Fischer first studied photography at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich, his birthplace. After leaving Switzerland for the Netherlands, he moved to Amsterdam in 1993. 

Urs Fischer is an artist with an unclassifiable style. He alternates between drawings, installations, collages, and sculptures, thus making it very difficult to define a guideline for his artistic production. Above all, the artist seeks to challenge the spectator, and to do this, all means are permitted. He works just as well with solid materials, wax and food as he does with everyday objects. It is not limited to any scale, with the sole aim of producing a unique and striking work.

In 2004, he began the construction of a breadcrumb chalet, "Untitled (Bread House)", which he completed in 2005. The following year, he completed the construction of a gigantic lamp, representing bears, named “Untitled (Lamp / Bear)". It was bronze, 7 meters high, weighs twenty tons, and linked together by bulbs coming out of their heads. The sculpture was auctioned at Christie's in 2011 and sold for $6.8 million. In 2007, during his exhibition in New York at Gavin Brown Enterprise, he had the room reserved for him dug with a hole more than two meters deep. In 2010, “Untitled (Candle)", one of his wax sculptures, sold for $ 1 million at Sotheby's.

Urs Fischer is a recognized artist on the international contemporary scene. Since his first solo exhibition in Zurich in 1996, he has not stopped traveling the world to present his work. Among his most prestigious exhibitions, we can cite that of the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary in New York, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In 2003, 2007 and 2011, he participated in the Venice Biennale and Manifesta 3. Besides his artistic activity, Urs Fischer has his own publishing house. He is also a member of Scientology.