This Is a House Made of Bread

At the much-anticipated return of Art Basel, Urs Fischer’s tactile wonder will attract plenty of attention. But if it were a simple painting, would it attract more dollars?

- James Tarmy

In 2004 the artist Urs Fischer started to build prototypes of a 16.4-foot-high gingerbread-style house made from about 2,500 loaves of bread. It was a process, he says, filled with trial and error: Binding agents including marzipan and raw dough were attempted and discarded (too unstable) until he discovered polyurethane foam was the ideal mortar.

The house was constructed on an open outdoor lot in Vienna, where eventually the daily delivery of dumpsters filled with bread began to draw attention from passersby. Their reaction, to Fischer’s surprise, was a combination of incredulity and outrage. “Austria’s a very Catholic country,” he says, “and everyone there thought the bread was somehow about the body of Christ.”

But when he actually exhibited the work, called Untitled (Bread House), at the New York gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, “the discussion there was all about carbohydrates,” Fischer says. “At which point I gave up with whatever it ‘should’ be about.”

Now it will be shown in Switzerland in Art Basel’s “Unlimited” section for large-scale works, which opens to (masked, vaccinated) VIPs on Sept. 20. Once again the reception to