Urs Fischer’s “Big Clay #4” rises in Midtown (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
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big clay #4 slideshow
Four years ago, Zurich-born, New York-based artist Urs Fischer installed “Untitled (Lamp/Bear),” a twenty-three-foot-tall, nearly twenty-ton cuddly yellow teddy bear wearing a working lamp for a hat on the plaza in front of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Ave.; the piece sold at auction that summer for more than $6.8 million. Fischer has now returned to that triumphant location with “Big Clay #4,” a forty-two-and-a-half-foot-tall aluminum sculpture of a piece of squeezed clay, complete with the artist’s fingerprints. When the piece was being installed, a printout of plans left near construction materials on the plaza showed the ultimate sculpture (actually for “Big Clay #3”) in multiple colors, reminiscent of Jeff Koons’s “Play-Doh” from his recent Whitney retrospective. But alas, the colors were just to help identify which section went where; the final sculpture is plain silver, twisted metal rising like the Midtown skyscrapers surrounding it, though not quite as orderly. Fischer, who has worked with such materials as bread, wax, and vegetables, here goes back to the very source, a small lump of clay that he squeezed, scanned, digitally enlarged, and now has cast for all to see but not touch.