In 1987, Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) created Snowman, a permanently frozen snowman sculpture installed outside (and preserved by) the Römerbrücke power station in Saarbrücken, Germany. In 2017, Fischli was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to remake the work. His Snowman consisted of three copper spheres contained in a large freezer. As frost accumulated on the spheres, the snowman grew in size, eventually requiring defrosting, his smile redrawn daily to preserve his expression. This artist’s book tells the story of the Snowman from 1987 to today, chronicling its iterations in a photo essay. It also illustrates the transformation of the snowman’s cultural meanings since the 18th century, from “bogeyman” to loveable friend, and shows how the generation of electricity has changed in the last 35 years, from thermal power station to solar energy.

This book documents installations of Haus a 1:15 scale representation of a modern commercial building by celebrated Swiss duo Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012). These include the 2016 recreation of the 1987 Skulptur Projekte Münster for the Guggenheim Museum and its permanent installation at Offenen Rennbahn in Zürich.

Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012) are celebrated around the world for their multidisciplinary projects, films, sculptures and books. The two artists began producing their Polyurethane Objects in 1982, and continued until Weiss tragically died in 2012 from cancer. Hand-carved and hand-painted, these sculptural works overturn the notion of the readymade while uncovering wit and poetry in everyday things. Edited and sequenced by Fischli himself, the book features 140 objects, depicting such humble and seemingly inauspicious items as power tools, shipping pallets, stained paintbrushes and buckets. The foldout cover depicts the sculptures as they are exhibited, in arrangements that evoke the distinctive disarray of an artist’s studio.

Fascinated with unconventional subject matter and material, Fischli and Weiss toy with the idea of “high art,” questioning popular narratives and movements in art and cultural history. Peter Fischli and David Weiss, presents an in-depth survey of the artists’ work from 1979 through 2012, when David Weiss died. With over two-dozen works drawn exclusively from Glenstone’s permanent collection, the works on display mine the everyday for the sublime and absurd-subtly infusing the familiar with the idiosyncratic or unknown. The catalog includes a group of rubber and clay sculptures, several photographic series, video projections, and the most recent iteration of Fischli and Weiss’ alter egos, Rat and Bear. Also shown is the artists’ most ambitious polyurethane installation to date, The Objects for Glenstone (2011), and a slide projection installation of over one thousand handwritten existential queries, Questions (2003).

Since the late 1970s, the Swiss conceptualists Fischli & Weiss have worked collaboratively to produce surprising, witty and oftentimes devious works in a range of media including sculpture, film, photography and installation. This comprehensive black-and-white index of the artists’ work from the 1970s till 2003, with text in German only, contains a complete exhibition history, bibliography and filmography. It is an invaluable resource, and brings together an oeuvre influenced by Pop and Conceptual art, Dada and Surrealism that has always managed to defy categorization even while making a superbly deep impression.

This little gem is the fourth edition of the catalogue to Suddenly This Overview, the influential Fischli & Weiss exhibition of unfired clay objects which took place in December and January of 1981 and 82. That exhibition represented the first major collaboration between the artists, who have since become two of the most influential figures on the international scene. In this pocket-sized volume, the small, very hand-made-looking clay sculptures are reproduced in low-tech black-and-white and accompanied by the amusing descriptive captions with which they were originally exhibited. Thus a little man on a bicycle comes with the caption, “Dr. Hoffmann on the first LSD trip,” while two figures walking along a sidewalk with guitars are described, “Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing I can’t get no satisfaction.” Classic.

Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss have been collaborating since 1979 on clever, charming works that turn everyday detritus–from stuffed animals and beer bottles to sausages and magazine advertisements–into witty scenarios of balance, collapse and blissful silliness. Their best-known work remains their film The Way Things Go, in which such items are arranged in a domino sequence to fall, catch fire and roll along, with dizzying hilarity. All of the duo’s projects are permeated with this delight in testing and demonstrating the wondrousness of the world. This survey looks back at Fischli & Weiss’ sculptures, installations, photographs and films of the past 30 years, presenting such early works as the photo series Wurstserie (Sausage Series) and their popular installation “Question Projection.”

Plötzlich diese Übersicht is a loose collection of over 350 hand-sculpted, unfired clay figures, is one of those artworks that is very familiar even to those who are not all that interested in art. Fischli and Weiss have created a masterpiece, using an entirely unspectacular material to form sculptural snapshots that sparkle with cheerful wit: sketched models of everyday situations and objects; clay reproductions that reveal the absurdity and artificial normality of the ordinary. Alongside them are semi-freely imagined scenes and events from history, culture, entertainment, sport and assorted memories from their own biographies, immortalised in emblematic scenarios. The titles, with their characteristic subtle mockery, fragmentary encyclopadic knowledge and serious irony, are an integral part of the work. This expansive catalogue raisonné art book gives an overview of the ‘Overview’. Moreover, the superb illustrations reveal the sculptural aspect of this multipartite work, begun in 1981, the quality and continued relevance of which goes beyond the sly humour of language and creative skill.

800 Views of Airports documents a lengthy series of work by Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012), comprising 1,010 photographs to date, all of which appear here complete for the first time. For this ongoing documentary project, the artistic duo photograph the airports they passed through in their travels around the world over nearly 25 years, in a quest for exotic banality throughout different cultures. Their images of these nondescript airports focus on the humdrum aspect of air travel: the fuel vehicles, the baggage trucks, the daily routines of airport workers, the long antiseptic corridors and sprawling tarmacs surrounded by panoramic views of empty vistas. Whether presenting a Lufthansa airplane sitting idle in a yellowy light, a Swiss Air plane waiting in a neon-haunted dusk or an Air France plane getting its belly filled in the dead of night, Fischli and Weiss’s images present the evanescence of any national identity when reduced to a symbol on a vertical stabilizer. 800 Views of Airports reveal the non-places encircling our world, and the non-journeys that have come to define our contemporary life in transit, while simultaneously offering carefully composed images that are strangely placid and restful.

Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en el Palacio de Cristal de Madrid, abril-agosto 2009. Presenta la obra de los dos artistas suizos que trabajan juntos desde 1979 y que por primera vez expone, individualmente, en España. Su colaboración abarca los ámbitos del cine, la fotografía, la escultura y las instalaciones multimedia. El catálogo se plantea como una fábula, como reflejo del ludismo y la imaginación que caracteriza la obra de estos autores. Incluye imágenes de sus vídeos e instalaciones así como textos de Jean La Fontaine, Stefan Zweifel, Peter Weber, Patrick Frey, Michael Oppitz y los propios artistas Fischli and Weiss.

The work by the two artists from 1979 to the present Swiss artists Peter Fischli (*1952 in Zurich) and David Weiss (*1946 in Zurich) have been working as a duo since 1979, availing themselves of a wide range of artistic forms of expression. This publication features the artists’ sculptures, installations, photographs, and films from the past twenty-five years. Along with the seemingly trivial, fundamental questions about human existence inspire their ironic, clever works. Their path seemed to be laid out for them as early as 1980, when they produced their first collaborative piece, the photo cycle Wurstserie (Sausage Series). Whole and sliced sausages became protagonists in adventurous settings that would make great material for a film. In their installation Fragenprojektion (Question Projection) (1981–2002), they confront the viewer with poetic everyday questions, such as “Will happiness find me?”

Sonne, Mond und Sterne is an 800-page artist’s book consisting of just as many images, inspired by an international selection of magazine advertisements and compiled and organized into loose categories by the influential Swiss artistic collaborators Fischli & Weiss. Designed in collaboration with the rising Zurich design firm NORM, this volume reconfigures Fischli & Weiss’ contribution to the Ringier AG Annual Report 2007. It is a revealing–and perhaps unnerving–look at the images and slogans that constitute our glutted contemporary media landscape. The viewer is plunged into a flood of imagery that, when taken out of its original commercial context, unfolds into unlikely open-ended narratives. Based in Zürich, Fischli & Weiss began collaborating in 1979 in a variety of media including photography, video and installation. They are perhaps best known for their playful The Way Things Go (1987), a video documenting the endless machinations of a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that seems to have no practical purpose whatsoever. This volume, edited by Kunsthalle Zürich Director Beatrix Ruf, is a never-before-published work.

The Swiss collaborators Fischli & Weiss have said of this early series of color and black-and-white photographs, “Balance is most beautiful just shortly before it collapses.” Indeed their tense arrangements of household miscellany often look on the verge of falling, or are caught in the process. The only texts included with them are associative titles, including Natural Grace, (a spatula on a plate on a wine bottle on an apple on a cup), The Fart (chairs on Coke bottles and aerosol cans), and Invisible Power, (showing one end of a paper construction held aloft by the breeze from a small fan). Many of the constructions appear under several titles, in several styles: Completion, when shot in grainy, starkly lit black-and-white, becomes Honor, Courage, Confidence, and in close-up, Can I , May I, Do Anything? On the page, these often elaborate and expansive objects acquire an incidental quality that makes them both more real and more transient. Ultimately, the only evidence of their existence is these images. While a small selection of these works appeared in the artist’s book Quiet Afternoon, most have never before been published in any form.

Long before Peter Fischli and David Weiss made Fotografias, Nancy Spector had noted that the two liked to “undermine conventional distinctions between high and low art.” This collection of underexposed black-and-white images does exactly that, recreating low-end figurative paintings as muddy, dark, snapshots and minting them anew as fine art. Subjects include landscapes and historical scenes, animal and mythological beings, and, yes, female figures.

Fischli and Weiss are highly prestigious, bluechip contemporary artists who work with sculpture, photography and video, positioned at the very cutting edges of new art. They represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennales of 1995 and 2003, and won the Leone d’Oro prize in the latter for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me? The style of the work is extremely varied; what remains consistent throughout is an air of quiet unpredictability. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous (a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied after Composing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’); to the banal (a photographic series devoted to Airports); and even the apparently invisible (their Untitled installation, simulating through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures an unfinished exhibition site). Fischli & Weiss’ work can be immune to the rules of gravity, for example in the Quiet Afternoon series, photographs of miraculously balanced objects. The pair’s work also seems able to overcome the constraints of time and space, for example in their apparently endless journeys, resulting in the innumerable Visible World picture-postcard photographs of cities all over the world. With a truly unique body of work which is sometimes childishly thrown together, sometimes a virtuoso triumph of sculpture and moving image, this is the first book to draw together the mystery and contradiction of Fischli & Weiss. Fischli & Weiss have exhibited extensively worldwide. Their solo exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988) and the Tate Modern, London (2005).

Paying tribute to an artistic partnership of more than 30 years, this richly illustrated book explores Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s acclaimed and influential body of work, known for its sly humor and profound meditations on the everyday. Throughout the course of their collaboration, Peter Fischli and David Weiss celebrated the sheer triviality of everyday existence, observing the world with bemused detachment. As this book shows, their often humorous work offers a sustained reflection on the intertwined strands of leisure, productivity, and playful absurdity that shape our lives. With its deliberately mundane subject matter and quotidian source material, their work explores the poetics of banality in a wide range of mediums, including photography, videos, slide projections, films, books, sculptures, and multimedia installations. This retrospective volume features an in-depth, illustrated survey of the artists’ long history of collaboration, from the early Sausage Series (1979)―staged vignettes created in miniature using deli meats and various household items―to their last work, the large-scale public installation Rock on Top of Another Rock (2009–present), augmented by documentary images, notes on process, and interview excerpts culled from the artists’ Zurich-based archives. A series of probing essays on their practice and thematic concerns rounds out this definitive account of Fischli and Weiss’s vital contribution to contemporary art.