Peter Fischli David Weiss
Objects on pedestals
January 29–March 28, 2009
London
Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present Objects on Pedestals, a survey of sculpture works by acclaimed Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. The exhibition includes a selection from the series Rubber Sculptures (1986–1988), which comprises a number of life-size black rubber casts of ordinary and commonplace objects, including a chest of drawers, a table, a candle and a cutlery tray. The exhibition also features a number of sculptures, all made in 2007 in unfired clay, which also depict normal and quotidian objects, such as a shoe or a jug, although on an exaggerated scale. Together, these two bodies of work reveal the artists’ ongoing fascination with the banal and absurd qualities of the everyday, and the materiality and tactility of mass consumption.
Infused with Fischli & Weiss’s characteristic wit and knowing irony, Rubber Sculptures and the clay sculptures prompt intriguing questions about the form and function of the objects that facilitate modern living. The heavy black vulcanite rubber invokes a range of associations which sits at odds with the practical uses of the objects assembled, requiring the viewer to look askance at the everyday things that are on view. Industrial, durable, even kinky, the black rubber material gives the forms of these mundane items a disconcerting and fetishised quality, as plain and commonplace things bounce and bend in a way which ill suits their function or purpose, and are installed and scrutinised in the gallery space. As the objects are divested of any recognised utility, they become charged with an aesthetic and sensory resonance which, both through the anonymising effect of the black colouration, and the simultaneously seductive and repulsive tactile quality of the rubber, presents a disquieting and intriguing image of the domestic world.