Since 1979, the duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, have used objects and motifs filling our everyday lives so as to assemble them in constructions in which the derisory vies with the poetic: food, pillows, kitchen utensils, flowers or airports are transformed into subjects of wondrous exploration for the two Zurich-based artists.Their half-serious, half-amused gaze shines a particular light, between a delicate halo and sober neutrality, on this banality.
Films, photographs and sculptures convey the post-Dadaist spirit of the artists, who transform the dynamic of the commonplace into a mainspring of wonder and reveal the aesthetic qualities of things which, at first sight, seemed to lack them. The ordinary and insignificant nourish the creation of visual, protean fictions, whose pleasant triviality is tinged with the absurd. Fischli and Weiss reveal to us a part of a visible world which seems to have disappeared from our focus of attention. Mischievously and with an innocent air, they point out to us just how everyday elements are a source of potential delight.
The pertinence of this research has found a considerable echo on the international scene, where Fischli and Weiss now feature among the leading world artists. Their work was presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1992 and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1996. Ten years later, a major exhibition was devoted to them successively at the Tate Modern in London (2006-2007), the Kunsthaus Zürich (2007) and at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2007-2008). In 2016, the Guggenheim Museum in New York in turn offers a comprehensive overview of their works in a major retrospective How to Work Better.
Films, photographs and sculptures convey the post-Dadaist spirit of the artists, who transform the dynamic of the commonplace into a mainspring of wonder and reveal the aesthetic qualities of things which, at first sight, seemed to lack them. The ordinary and insignificant nourish the creation of visual, protean fictions, whose pleasant triviality is tinged with the absurd. Fischli and Weiss reveal to us a part of a visible world which seems to have disappeared from our focus of attention. Mischievously and with an innocent air, they point out to us just how everyday elements are a source of potential delight.
The pertinence of this research has found a considerable echo on the international scene, where Fischli and Weiss now feature among the leading world artists. Their work was presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1992 and at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1996. Ten years later, a major exhibition was devoted to them successively at the Tate Modern in London (2006-2007), the Kunsthaus Zürich (2007) and at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg (2007-2008). In 2016, the Guggenheim Museum in New York in turn offers a comprehensive overview of their works in a major retrospective How to Work Better.
