Piazza Signoria hosts Urs Fischer’s Big Clay sculpture

FLORENCE, ITALY – Piazza Signoria is once again hosting in Florence a great contemporary art event. On the occasion of the 30th edition of the Biennale Internazionale d’Antiquariato di Firenze the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, one of the leading artists on the world scene today, exposes in the historical center of Florence.

The project Big Clay #4 and 2 Tuscan Men consists, in what has become something of a tradition, in the presentation of a monumental work of art in that dazzling open-air sculpture museum that is Piazza Signoria, staging what is at the very least a thought-provoking contrast between the classic and the contemporary. The event is organized by the Associazione Mus.e.

Urs Fischer rose to fame in 2011 at the 50th edition of the Venice Biennale when he melted a full-size wax copy of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman, one of the great masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture that has been on display in the Loggia dei Lanzi since 1583. Fischer is now returning to the “scene of the crime” with a new and astonishing artistic project that is bound to trigger strong reactions and a heated debate on the language of contemporary art, on the redefinition of taste, on the development of techniques and on the concept of beauty, in a thematic and formal “clash of the Titans” between neoclassicism and the shapeless, between ancient and modern, between the “timeless” images of Bandinelli, Cellini and Giambologna and the “shapeless” images (thus by definition “having more than one image”) of Urs Fischer, who for years now has been exploring such issues as imperfection and entropy or the relationship between an artwork and space, between art and the world of the cinema, between daily life and the artistic imagination with an experimental drive and expressive force as uncustomary as they are astonishing, even as he renews or dares to experiment with techniques and themes without limitations imposed by time, gender or style.

The Swiss artist (and long-time New York resident) has devised an innovative dual project focusing on sculpture, in view of the historical and artistic urban context that is Piazza Signoria, so overburdened with the marks of history, a fully-fledged Renaissance agora, the nerve centre of republican power which Cosimo I, duke and grand duke of Florence and Tuscany, transformed into a gallery of ancient and modern masterpieces in marble and bronze alike.

Piazza della Signoria will provide the setting for Big Clay, a large metal sculpture (about 12 metres tall) whose shape has something about it that is at once primordial and childlike, totemic and architectural. To complete the project, Fischer will be placing two artworks on the Arengario of Palazzo Vecchio, between the reproductions of Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, in the furrow of the exhibitions staged by Jeff Koons (2015) and Jan Fabre (2016). The Swiss artist will be placing two human figures on the Arengario, trasforming them into candles that will slowly be consumed throughout the duration of the exhibition, symbolising human transience and the lasting quality of art.

The two figures will be on display for about a month, until they have melted completely. The three artworks establish a kind of creative dialogue resulting in a tight debate between the simple gesture of the artisan who, in modelling matter, transforms it into a metal monument – Big Clay #4 (2013-2014) – and that monument into wax – the two figures – which slowly changes shape and returns to being simple, shapeless matter in a kind of dual process of figurative consumption and retrogression.