24. Urs Fischer
b. 1973
The Grass Munchers cast aluminum, pigments, pins, wax and hair 56 x 62 x 44 cm (22 x 24 3/8 x 17 3/8 in.) Executed in 2007, this work is number 1 from an edition of 2 plus 1 artist’s proof and is accompanied by a certifcate of authenticity signed by the artist. Estimate £100,000-150,000 $132,000-199,000 €117,000-176,000 plus Buyers Premium and VAT*
Provenance Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Zurich, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Urs Fischer: Large, Dark & Empty, 8 September - 17 November 2007 Berlin, Burger Collection, Zimmerstrasse 90-91, Conflicting Tales: Subjectivity (Quadrilogy, Part 1), 4 September - 13 December 2009 Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Madame Fischer, 15 April - 15 July 2012 (another edition exhibited) Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Urs Fischer, 21 April - 19 August 2013 (another edition exhibited) New York, The Met Breuer, Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, 21 March - 22 July 2018 Literature Bice Curiger, Massimiliano Gioni and Jessica Morgan, Urs Fischer: Shovel in a Hole, New York, 2009, pp. 76, 227, 383 (another example illustrated, pp. 76, 383)
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 diferent 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 fesh 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.
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