Swiss-born artist Urs Fischer is exhibiting in Piazza della Signoria, Florence, from September 22nd to January 21st. Coinciding with the opening of the Florence International Biennial Antiques Fair which will be on from September 23rd to October 1st, the world-wide known square will be hosting a 12 metre high aluminium statue entitled Big Clay. The statue is meant to be a metaphor of the simplicity and primordial aspect of the human gesture that moulds shape; for this reason, the artist’s fingerprints are to be found on the surface of the work.
After having melted at the Venice Biennale of 2011 a wax statue copy of Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, whose original stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, for this exhibition Fischer will create two wax figures of Francesco Bonami and Fabrizio Moretti, the curators of the event. These will be positioned in Piazza della Signoria, between the replicas of Michelangelo’s David and Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes and left to slowly consume themselves during the event, symbols of human finitude.
Certainly Fischer’s combination of monumentalism and playfulness, totemism and the burlesque is perfect for that theatre of art and politics which Piazza della Signoria represents.
