Having been in Florence the week before, I was struck by the  instillation that Urs Fischer presented.  Here stood the destructrion of one of the sculptures in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, Italy.  The sculpture that the instillation is based on, The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna, contains a man holding a woman in the air with a crouching man at his feet. The scene is of the abduction of a Sabine woman with her husband at the bottom looking up.

Fischer’s instillation contained a wax representation of the original stone sculpture from Florence.  It started out whole and melted throughout the time frame of the exhibit.  I found an article on this exhibit that has images of this piece a few months before I experienced it. When I visited the Biennial, the upper two figures of Urs Fischer’s sculpture had melted leaving the lower figure looking in anguish not at his disappearing wife, but at the melting burning decaying destruction of the sculpture itself…or is it the destruction of what the sculpture respresents?

On the edges of the sculpture are office chairs that are also decaying.  The chairs are also wax and melted throughout the time frame of the instillation.

Below is a photograph of the sculpture, The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna.

This month had a pleasing array of good art shows in the downtown gallery scene of Indianapolis, Indiana.  I started off my evening by visiting wUG LAKU’s STUDIO & gARAGE.  The current show is a representation from Wug’s earlier work, and is entitled “Raw.”  The developments of his ideas concerning his investigation into nature and language are shown through several unfinished sketches and early paintings. The early paintings are different from the digitally manipulated photographs of his more recent work, and yet somehow they seemed the same.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) a First Friday is also a time of socialization, and I did not delve into the art show as much as it deserved.  There are deep questions, thoughts, and art making going on in the garage.

From there I ran into a show by another artist I know, Dave Voelpel.  Dave does abstract landscape paintings and had his show in the Five Seasons Studio Gallery.  Lately he has incorporated the palate knife into his work giving long soft strokes in his thick paint.  I have seen paintings of his where he has used a variety of things to thicken the paint…even coffee grinds!  Dave Voelpel also had a few collages on display.  It was interesting to see the designs he made with his patchwork of recognizable images.

The final stop in the circle city complex was at Matthew Davey’s new studio.  The studio was sparse, but had a few nice figurative works in it.  There were two drawings of female nudes on one wall, a huge (10 feet? by 6 feet?) painting against one wall, another drawing on a third wall and a medium sized sculpture set up in an adjoining room.  This little adjoining room was set up reminiscent to me, as a shrine.  The sculpture (Lily, Lily, Rose) was sharply lit from the front (which was disappointing to someone who wanted to study it from all angles, but provided excellent, sharp lighting for the front of the sculpture), and there was soft music playing in the background.  It was a wonderful, detailed bronze sculpture of a nude woman with her arms above her head and her face cast upward.  It was set upon a pedestal that is reminiscent of a nail.  Around the foot of the pedestal was a pile of smooth rocks.  It was beautiful.