Since 1979, Peter Fischli (b. 1952, Zürich, Switzerland) and David Weiss (b. 1946, Zürich, Switzerland; d. 2012) have been collaborating on a body of work that combines, rearranges, or otherwise manipulates their daily experiences into something new and unexpected. Executed in a variety of media, including unfired clay, polyurethane, photography, and video, their work playfully ignores the distinction between high and low art. The duo is perhaps best known for the 1987 film 

, in which an improbable, Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events unfolds involving household objects and detritus in their studio.

The work of Fischli and Weiss has been exhibited at major museums and biennials around the world. The artists represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and were awarded the 2003 Golden Lion for 

 (1981-2002), an installation of more than a thousand existential queries collected over several years. Fischli and Weiss also took part in Documenta 8 (1987) and 10 (1997). Their retrospective 

 was organized by the Walker Art Center in 1996 and traveled to San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. In 2006 Tate Modern presented another retrospective, 

, which traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg. They participated in Venice’s 2012 Architectural Biennale and 2013 Art Biennale and have had exhibitions at the Art institute of Chicago (2011) and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013). In 2016 the Guggenheim presented 

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better

, their third career retrospective, which traveled to Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Peter Fischli lives and works in Zurich.

Peter Fischli David Weiss

Peder Lund is proud to announce its second exhibition dedicated to the renowned Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012). The exhibition brings together 

 (1997–2006), one of their most celebrated film works, alongside three arresting black rubber sculptures dating from 2012: 

Since the early 1980s, Fischli and Weiss have produced one of the most inventive and influential bodies of work in contemporary art. Their practice, which spans film, sculpture, installation, and photography, is distinguished by its ability to elevate the ordinary into the realm of the extraordinary. By probing the overlooked details of daily life with both humor and rigor, they have left an indelible mark on the trajectory of postwar art history.

At the core of the exhibition at Peder Lund is 

(1997-2006), a film composed of still images that unfolds in a hypnotic rhythm. The work functions as a "best-of" compilation drawn from four earlier slide projections — 

.Originally created for their major retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern in 2006, which traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich, and Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this work is not simply a presentation of prior material, but a recontextualization that gives new coherence to these disparate series. The film reflects the artists' sensitivity to the cumulative power of image and sequence. In this way, 

 is both retrospective and generative: a reflection on their archive, and a work in its own right.

The work creates a haunting visual cycle of natural forms in bloom and decay, as the images oscillate between the delicate beauty of flowers and the darker menace of fungi, conjuring associations with transience, intoxication, and death. 

 reflects Fischli and Weiss's abiding interest in systems of classification. Like their other slide-based projects (

, it operates as a pseudo-anthropological archive, one that blurs the boundaries between science, amateur photography, and art. But where other series lean into deadpan humor or dry conceptualism, this work reveals a tenderness — a genuine engagement with beauty that is unafraid to approach the sublime. The film has been a centerpiece of several other major solo exhibitions of Fischli and Weiss's work, including at the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan in 2008; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in 2013; and the Aspen Art Museum in 2017. It is widely regarded as one of the duo's most significant meditations on the paradoxes of life and mortality.

Counterbalancing the fragile imagery of the film are three imposing black rubber sculptures: 

. These works extend Fischli and Weiss's long-standing investigation into the banal, recalling earlier projects such as the 

 (1981-2012), in which they used humble materials to reimagine everyday objects and moments. For the rubber works, the artists employed a conventional sculptural process — modelling in plaster before casting — but chose an unconventional medium: synthetic black rubber.

The result is at once familiar and disorienting. Rendered at a one-to-one scale, the sculptures in the gallery mimic ordinary forms of construction and architecture yet are stripped of their utility. Begun in the mid-1980s and developed in parallel to the artist's unfired clay sculptures, the black rubber sculptures from this series range in scale and subject matter, including such objects as dog bowls, drawers, tree roots, birds, ottomans, and even a functional record album. The dense, absorptive rubber carries with it connotations of mass production, industrial labor, and even fetishistic desire, transforming otherwise banal forms into mute and uncanny presences. Their blackened surfaces function almost like shadows — simulations of objects that no longer serve their original purpose, emptied of narrative and function yet charged with psychological weight.

The black rubber sculptures by Fischli and Weiss have been featured in a number of key institutional exhibitions, including the major retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, which subsequently traveled to Museo Jumex in Mexico City.

, the black rubber sculptures reveal Fischli and Weiss's ongoing fascination with transformation and doubleness: the ordinary made strange, the useful rendered useless, the beautiful laced with menace. If the film proposes a cycle of nature's vitality and decay, the sculptures underscore a parallel meditation on permanence and entropy in the manmade world. Together, they demonstrate the duo's capacity to destabilize aesthetic hierarchies and invite new ways of perceiving the everyday.

Solo exhibitions of Fischli and Weiss's work have been organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1996); Museu d'art contemporani de Barcelona (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2003–04); Museo Tamayo arte contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005); and Tate Modern, London (2006–07). In 1995 and 2003, they represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennale, receiving the Leone d'Oro award for their 2003 submission. Their work also appeared in Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1987, 1997), and in 

 at the Guggenheim Museum (2002–03) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003–04). Their work is owned by some of the most important institutions in the world.

With this exhibition, Peder Lund reaffirms its commitment to presenting seminal works by artists who have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of contemporary art. Following the gallery's first exhibition with Fischli and Weiss in 2010, we are proud to once again highlight the depth, humor, and philosophical resonance of their oeuvre, offering audiences a rare opportunity to engage with two defining strands of their artistic production.

Works