Exhibition - Peter Fischli David Weiss: Polyurethane Objects

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Peter Fischli David Weiss: Polyurethane Objects, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The exhibition features an installation of over four hundred carved and hand-painted objects created between 1993 and 2014. It marks the 25th anniversary of the artists’ first exhibition with the gallery and will be the largest presentation of their work in New York since their 2016 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss began collaborating in 1979 and made their first painted polyurethane objects in 1982. Meticulously crafted, these objects reproduce ordinary items found in the artists’ studio, including paint cans, tools, wooden pallets, cleaning supplies, and other detritus of the artists’ work. The essential handmade nature of these works situates them in direct opposition to the readymade. In the artists’ words: “By removing their function, the objects are no longer enslaved by it, and the only thing you can do is look at them, and this opens a space in which to do something else. It is a matter of reinvesting these objects with meaning without changing them.”

Just as the polyurethane objects depict quotidian items, their seemingly random arrangements create situations that skirt the periphery of one’s attention. The routine groupings seem to portray moments of rest or work in progress, finding symbolic meaning and humor in the mundane. As Weiss has said, “we produce an illusion and then take it back in a cruel way. You suddenly recognize that what you see isn’t there at all, but you’re quite sure you see it all the same.” Describing this crisis of perception, a curator once wrote, “the great theme of the work is the dialogue between the sublime and the ordinary.”

The work of Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) has been the subject of large-scale surveys at numerous museums around the world, most recently in 2016 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Their work has been featured in Documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster, and six Venice Biennales, where they were awarded the Golden Lion in 2003 for their installation Questions (1981–2002). Peter Fischli lives and works in Zurich.