Fischli & Weiss valuation
Swiss duo who made art out of sausages, unfired clay, balanced kitchenware, carved foam and a chain reaction thirty minutes long.
Peter Fischli, born in Zurich in 1952, and David Weiss (1946–2012), also from Zurich, worked together from 1979 as Fischli/Weiss.
What a work by Fischli & Weiss is worth
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Bio
Peter Fischli, born in Zurich in 1952, and David Weiss (1946–2012), also from Zurich, worked together from 1979 as Fischli/Weiss. Their first joint work, the Sausage Series of 1979, staged scenes — a car crash, a carpet shop — with sausages, cold cuts and household odds and ends. Suddenly This Overview, begun in 1981, is hundreds of small unfired clay sculptures of moments great and trivial, and the Equilibres, or Quiet Afternoon, of 1984 to 1986, photograph precarious balancing acts of vegetables, cutlery and tools. Der Lauf der Dinge, The Way Things Go, of 1987, a thirty-minute film of a chain reaction through tyres, ladders, fire, foam and liquid in a warehouse, was shown at documenta 8 and became one of the most widely seen artworks of its time. In the 1990s they carved and painted exact replicas of the clutter of a studio in polyurethane, and in 2003 they won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
Almost everything is a photograph in an edition, a sculpture in an edition, or a unique object. The photographs, among them the Equilibres, the Flowers and Mushrooms and the Airports, were issued in numbered editions in several sizes, so the size, edition and signatures should be recorded. The carved polyurethane objects are deceptively fragile, the clay figures of Suddenly This Overview are unfired and break easily, and black rubber casts were also editioned. Matthew Marks, Sprüth Magers and Eva Presenhuber have been their galleries.
Zurich, documenta 8 and How to Work Better
Tate Modern gave them Flowers and Questions, a retrospective, in 2006.
How to Work Better, the Guggenheim's retrospective of 2016, took its title from a list of rules they found in a Thai factory and painted on the side of an office building in Zurich.
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