Peter Fischli

Peter Fischli was born in 1952 and studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino (1975–76) and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna (1976–77) in Italy. In 1979 he began collaborating with David Weiss (1946–2012), and the pair held their first solo exhibition in 1981 at Galerie Balkon in Geneva. Rejecting any fixed style, medium, or material, their practice explores the poetics of banality — the sublimity found in the objects and events of everyday life. Drawing from Dada, Surrealism, Pop art, and Conceptual art, their photographs, videos, slide projections, films, books, sculptures, and multimedia installations are marked by sharp observation and an uncanny wit.

Solo exhibitions of Fischli and Weiss’s work have been organised by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1996); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2003–04); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005); and Tate Modern, London (2006–07). They represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2003, receiving the Leone d’Oro for their 2003 presentation. Their work has also been shown at Documenta, Kassel (1987, 1997) and in the exhibition Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum (2002–03) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003–04). Weiss died in 2012 in Zurich, where Fischli continues to live and work.