David Weiss (1946-2012)

David Weiss, of the Swiss artist duo Fischli/Weiss, died Apr 27, it has been reported. He was 66 years old. Weiss began collaborating with Peter Fischli in 1979. Consistently unsettling the boundaries between amateur craft and conceptual rhetoric, together the pair made odd sculptural arrangements out of sausages and household tools, took a myriad of photographs of banal settings like airports and tourist attractions, and made the seminal art films The Least Resistance (1981) and The Right Way (1982-83), in which a giant rat and bear navigate the underbelly of Los Angeles art scene and a sublime alpine landscape, respectively, while engaging in philosophical discourse, and The Way Things Go (1987), in which objects in their studio are involved in a series of domino-style kinetic and chemical chain reactions. The pair were awarded a Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Biennale for their work Questions, for which non sequitur questions were projected in multiple languages around a darkened room. They were also recognized with the prestigious Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2007 and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2010. The pair made multiple appearances at the Venice Biennale, including in 2011’s “ILLUMInations,” as well as the five-year periodic survey Documenta. Their retrospective survey organized in 2006 by the Tate Modern, “Flowers & Questions. A Retrospective,” earned widespread acclaim and traveled to venues including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. The pair last exhibited in Japan in a solo exhibition held in late 2010 at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Related: Peter Fischli David Weiss: The Techne of Schadenfreude

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