Peter Fischli & David Weiss - Work

Work

Art critics often see parallels to Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth or Jean Tinguely in Fischli and Weiss' parody bearing work For their art, the duo made use of a large bandwidth of artistic forms of expression: film and photography, art books, sculptures made out of different materials, and multimedia installations. They adapted objects and situations from everyday life and placed them in an artistic context—often using humour and irony. Wurstserie (1979) was Fischli and Weiss’s first collaborative project, setting the tone for their future work. In the series, ordinary sausages and slices of sausages became the protagonists of scenarios, alluding to situations such as cars in a traffic accident in an urban setting, layers of carpets and other situations. By the end of the 1980s, the duo had expanded their repertoire to embrace an iconography of the incidental, creating deadpan photographs of kitsch tourist attractions and airports around the world. For their contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale, at which they represented Switzerland, Fischli & Weiss exhibited 96 hours of video on 12 monitors that documented what they called "concentrated daydreaming"—real-time glimpses into daily life in Zurich: a mountain sunrise, a restaurant chef in his kitchen, sanitation workers, a bicycle race, and so on. For the Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), Fischli and Weiss planted a flower and vegetable garden conceived with an ecological point of view and documented its periodic growth through photographs.

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