Not a house on an island. Not a yacht in Monaco. Not even a Basquiat hanging in a climate-controlled vault. Urs Fischer creates art designed to vanish—monumental wax sculptures that burn like candles until nothing remains but pools of colored wax and the memory of what once stood.
The Swiss artist has spent two decades perfecting the art of impermanence, casting life-sized figures and Renaissance masterpieces in wax, embedding them with candle wicks, and watching them melt into oblivion. It is conceptual art meets performance art meets memento mori, and it has made Fischer one of the most provocative voices in contemporary sculpture.
The Philosophy of Flame
"For every moment the viewer turns their head away from the installation, they lose a piece of experience," Fischer has said. Each viewing is unique. The sculpture you see today will never exist in that exact form again. Tomorrow it will have changed, melted further, transformed by flame into something entirely new. By next week, it may be gone.
This is not art designed for posterity. This is art tied to its moment of death, a meditation on decay and decomposition that forces viewers to confront the impermanence of all things—including themselves. Fischer opposes being labeled a Conceptualist. He starts from materials, not ideas. But the idea emerges nonetheless: everything beautiful must eventually burn.
What If the Phone Rings
Fischer's breakthrough work, What If the Phone Rings (2003-19), depicts three nude female figures—one standing, one seated, one reclining on a couch—slowly melting into pools of skin-colored wax. The piece references Roy Lichtenstein's comic book women and the Renaissance tradition of the reclining nude, but it transforms these art historical touchstones into a contemporary vanitas painting. The earthly pleasures depicted—beauty, leisure, repose—are literally consumed by flame before your eyes.
The work took sixteen years to complete its cycle of exhibitions, each installation a unique performance of destruction. No two viewers saw the same sculpture. Some witnessed the figures in their full glory, every detail pristine. Others saw them half-melted, distorted, grotesque. Still others arrived to find only wax puddles and smoke-stained wicks.
Venice and Beyond
At the 2011 Venice Biennale, Fischer presented Untitled (Illuminations) in the Arsenal Complex: a life-sized wax replica of Giambologna's The Abduction of a Sabine Woman, six wax chairs from different African regions, and a wax figure of Rudolf Stingel—Fischer's close friend and fellow artist. The entire installation was designed to burn. Visitors returned day after day to watch the transformation, documenting the slow dissolution of these objects in photographs and videos that now serve as the only record of what once existed.
The technical complexity is staggering. Fischer's early works were cut from Styrofoam and cast in wax. His modern pieces use 3D scans and printing for maximal precision. He hides additional candle wicks inside the sculptures to ensure complete melting, working with a team of professionals to execute these elaborate acts of creative destruction.
Dasha and the Female Form
In 2018, Fischer created Dasha, a life-sized wax sculpture of Russian art collector Dasha Zhukova, founder of Moscow's Garage Museum. It was Fischer's first female wax figure after years of making male sculptures, created at Zhukova's own suggestion. The piece captured her in perfect detail—and then set her aflame.
Fischer's female figures are "idealized, pop-cultural forms devoid of humanity," he has said, revealing their essence while fulfilling their only purpose: to burn and disappear. It is a commentary on how women are consumed by culture, transformed into images and icons, their humanity melted away by the heat of public attention.
The Bread House and Other Experiments
Wax is not Fischer's only medium of decay. In 2004-05, he constructed a Swiss chalet entirely from bread loaves, left it to rot, and released birds to feed on it. The Kiss (2017) was a plasticine copy of Rodin's famous sculpture that audiences were invited to reshape with their hands, transforming the work through touch. Fischer's art demands participation, interaction, the acceptance that nothing lasts forever.
Wax has a long history in sculpture—Ancient Egyptian death masks, Renaissance anatomical models, Madame Tussauds' celebrity figures. Edgar Degas used wax for Little Dancer of Fourteen Years to achieve a realistic skin effect. But Fischer takes the tradition further. For him, decomposition is not a flaw to be prevented but the final, crucial part of artistic expression.
The Collector's Dilemma
How do you collect art designed to self-destruct? Fischer's wax sculptures are sold in editions, each one unique in its momentary existence. Collectors purchase not a static object but a process, a performance, a guaranteed loss. They buy the experience of watching beauty dissolve, of owning something that will inevitably become nothing.
It is the ultimate luxury: art you cannot keep. Art that refuses to be preserved, catalogued, stored in a vault. Art that insists on its own mortality and, by extension, yours.
The Snowflake and the Avalanche
In a world obsessed with permanence—with preserving, archiving, immortalizing—Fischer's work is a radical act of acceptance. Things end. People die. Sculptures melt. The phone rings, and when you turn back, the moment has passed.
"You never know what snowflake is gonna cause an avalanche," as another artist once said. Fischer's snowflakes are made of wax, and they melt before they can accumulate. But the avalanche comes anyway—in the minds of viewers who watched something beautiful disappear and will never forget it.
That is the paradox of Fischer's art. By creating works designed to vanish, he has made something unforgettable. The sculptures are gone, but the experience remains. The wax has melted, but the idea endures. He has built monuments to impermanence that will outlive us all—not in museums, but in memory.
And perhaps that is the only immortality that matters.