Fischli & Weiss

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).