Sammlung Goetz

Peter Fischli, David Weiss

November 7, 2010 – March 11, 2011

“Fischli and Weiss open their refrigerator –the result is a brilliant work of art.” (Ingvild Goetz)

The work of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss is characterized by a special fondness for easily overlooked objects and situations from everyday life. These are amusingly featured by a wealth of sculptures, drawings, photographs, slide installations and films. The approximately 50 individual and composite works that Ingvild Goetz has collected since 1996 are exemplary in that they cover the entire span of the two artists’ cooperation, from 1979 until the present.
The unusual use of materials and the associated deception of our viewing habits are characteristic of the Swiss duo’s work. This is expressed, for example, by a series of objects made of synthetic rubber that were cast from original models: a dog bowl, a vinyl phonograph record, a root, a chest of drawers, a sculpture of a woman. The series of photographs entitled Wurstserie (1980) illustrates an exceptional composition of materials and narrative structure. For this first joint work, Fischli and Weiss draped sausages and slices of sausage on carpets, in refrigerators, ovens and rumpled beds and transformed them, together with pickles and cigarette butts, into elements of everyday scenes that ironically and subtly reconstruct excerpts from normal life.
Photography plays a major role in Fischli and Weiss’s oeuvre. Intensive study of their environment and associated travel throughout Switzerland and later in foreign countries has contributed over time to an archive of tens of thousands of photographs, which the artists chiefly present in serial fashion. The intended mediocrity reflects a central theme in the work of Fischli and Weiss: the banal, the obvious, the apparent is placed in the foreground, thus raising questions about the importance of life and art.