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. Â 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.
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