Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer was born in 1973 in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied photography and art and design at the Schule fur Gestaltung in Zurich for about two years before leaving without a degree, then moved to Amsterdam at nineteen. He later settled in the United States, where public sources place his base at different points in both New York and Los Angeles.

Fischer works across sculpture, installation, painting, collage, drawing, and occasionally digital media, often starting from ordinary objects and rendering them at monumental or deliberately unstable scale. His best known works include cast wax candle sculptures that burn down and melt over the course of an exhibition, oversized clay and aluminum figures such as Big Clay #4, and immersive photographic wallpaper installations.

His first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Marguerite de Ponty, opened at the New Museum in New York in 2009 and occupied three floors of the building. In 2011 he took part in the 54th Venice Biennale, Bice Curiger's ILLUMInations, showing wax candle sculptures including a burning wax copy of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women. In 2012 he was given a major monographic exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, where his London studio was reconstructed inside the museum alongside a survey of his practice; the show is commonly described as among the first the institution gave a living artist. He continues to exhibit widely, with recent solo shows at Gagosian in Rome and Athens and a 2026 takeover of both of Jeffrey Deitch's Los Angeles galleries.

Fischer's critical reputation rests on his ability to turn ordinary materials and processes into large scale, often self destroying spectacle. His melting wax sculptures at the 2011 Venice Biennale, described at the time in the art press as show stopping, exemplified the approach: monumental form paired with built in decay. The 2012 Palazzo Grassi exhibition, commonly described as among the first monographic shows that institution gave a living artist, was widely read as confirmation that his practice could sustain a museum's full architecture rather than a single gallery. A later 2017 survey of more than thirty works across the Legion of Honor in San Francisco reinforced the same reading, that Fischer's work operates through scale and site as much as through any single object.

Fischer's auction market is thin but high value. His confirmed auction record is Untitled (Lamp/Bear), which sold for USD 6,802,500 at Christie's New York on 11 May 2011. Some market databases reference a higher 2026 record price for a work called Nodosaurus, but the sale price, currency, and auction house for that transaction could not be independently confirmed, so the 2011 result remains the only verified high water mark. Arcimboldo (2019) sold for USD 693,000 at Christie's in November 2024, his highest publicly reported result in the 2022 to 2024 window and still well below the 2011 record. Artprice tracks 288 public auction results for the artist, concentrated in sculpture. Fischer has also tested newer sale channels: an edition from his CHAOS series of NFTs sold for about USD 97,700 through Loic Gouzer's Fair Warning app in 2021. He is represented by Gagosian and Sadie Coles HQ, with recent exhibition relationships at Massimo De Carlo, Salon 94, The Modern Institute, and Vito Schnabel Gallery.

Fischer's market sits at the high end but on thin trading volume, so any single result, including the 2011 record, should be read against a relatively small number of comparable public sales rather than as a smooth trend line. No catalogue raisonne has been identified in public sources, and no certificate of authenticity program is documented, so provenance and verification through his representing galleries carry more weight than usual. Public accounts differ on his current base between New York and Los Angeles, a reminder that biographical detail for an actively working artist can shift between sources and should be checked against current gallery statements before being treated as fixed.