Peter Fischli David Weiss
HAUS
April 27–August 10, 2019
Berlin
Sprüth Magers is pleased to present HAUS, a solo exhibition by Fischli Weiss, the Swiss artist duo known since the 1980s for their films including Der geringste Widerstand (The Least Resistance) and ambiguous sculptural everyday objects.
At the core of this new exhibition is Haus (House), a work Peter Fischli and David Weiss first developed for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987 and subsequently showed in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2016). An aluminum version of the work was permanently installed in Zurich last year. This exhibition focuses on the architectural reference system at the heart of the artists’ work with a selection of sculptures and archival material.
Haus was preceeded by a model-like sculpture with the same form that took aspects of the sketch and model as its subject matter. The artists continued to develop their interest in everyday architecture and brought the sculpture back to the public sphere for Münster. Nestled in an unpretentious area far from the usual tourist attractions, passersby heading to work identified it as an artwork through its 1:5 scale. The miniaturized building reflected its immediate surroundings and the functional architectures and activities typical to this public place including work, infrastructure and productivity. Its generic character derives from late modernist architectural form and the resulting aura of the everyday. The version of Haus in the Berlin exhibition is the wooden mold used for the aluminum casting of the outdoor sculpture in Zurich, consequently combining the model character of the sculpture with the idea of monumentality. The building represents the last moment of modernism, where utopian-positivist ideas drifted into the pragmatic and ultimately the commonplace. This strangely melancholic moment is compacted in this replica office complex’s unusual scale, which is simultaneously too large for a model and too small for a building.