Born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1973, Urs Fischer lives and works in London and Zurich. Fischer uses a range of media including drawing, sculpture and installation. Influenced by cartoons as much as by art history, Fischer revisits traditional genres, such as still life, the nude and landscapes. He assembles ordinary materials, notably Styrofoam, fruit, glue, silicone, wax or wood into contemporary pop allegories that oscillate between beauty and ugliness, awkwardness and grace. The idea that the act of making alchemically transforms the substances used is central to Fischer’s practice. Whether suspending half a cucumber nailed to half a banana in mid-air until it decays, lighting a giant wax candle in the shape of a woman until it melts, or building a life-size bread house gradually eaten away by parakeets, Fischer allows his work to take on a natural life of their own. These vanitas are animated by metaphysical events that transmogrify the commonplace objects and substances the artist-shaman has chosen, lending them a new mutant but mortal life within galleries and museums, the sites where eternity stages its last stance.