Peter Fischli & David Weiss - Suddently this Overview

The catalogue accompanies the installation ‘Suddenly This Overview’, presented at the Bourse de Commerce, Collection Pinault, Paris (from 14 February 2024).

Best known for their sculptures and videos, Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946-2012) worked together for over thirty years, beginning in the early 1950s. Their joint work is rooted in a diversity of media-installations, sculptures, photographs, films, videos and illustrated books.

Raw clay, a material usually reserved for amateur craftsmen, is used here for models that have been diverted from their original meaning - and are therefore incomprehensible without the legend associated with them.

Among the 76 figurines in the Pinault Collection, the emphasis is on a popular, universal spirit, translated into a joyful absurdity.

Here, Fischli and Weiss attempt to assemble a repertoire that is a cross between an encyclopaedia and a comic strip. In a biting text that accompanies the reproductions, Nancy Spector (curator, art historian and author, former director of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York) takes an amusing and enlightening look at this overview.

Taking a playful and experimental look at contemporary society, their work questions life, human existence and the paradoxes of our world with humour and lightness.