Presiding over the exhibition is Fischli’s PROFESSOREN-EDITION (The Phantom of the Authentic); the lithograph in the reception is based on a watercolor of a jungle-dwelling monkey that the artist painted for his godfather when he was ten years old. Its imagery echoes in RELIEFS (Monkeys), a group of three-dimensional objects—five sculptures in different hues which can be seen on the ground and first floors of the exhibition.

They are all made out of expanding polyurethane foam a material used in the construction industry to isolate buildings. Fischli adapted this material for his sculptures by filling it into previously made silicone molds and allowing it to expand in them before freeing the resulting relief and working it further by hand.

The sculptures’ frontal orientation is a formal reference to both the flatness of the original watercolor and features of classical reliefs. Each of the works appears on pedestal that (though ostensibly solid) is actually made of honeycomb cardboard and only appears to be as stable as a typical wooden sculpture base.

RELIEFS (Monkey 24), a variant of the monkey series, represents an exception. Although also a three-dimensional, sculptural work, it is hung on the wall and thus oscillates between the lithograph in the reception and the freestanding sculptures, linking the two mediums.

“A form made of countless tiny bubbles, the monkey is a sort of sculptural ghost, still carrying the hollowness of the gap it briefly filled while in its liquid state. It also still carries the aggressive formlessness of expanding foam, which had to be captured and compressed inside a mold in order for the monkey to appear.” –John Kelsey

Here the artist explores forms inherent to ordinary food packaging, the kind found in any supermarket or household. He creates new versions of familiar objects and shifts them to a new environment, interrogating the sculptural significance and artistic value of their formal design in a humorous way. The contrast imbues the works with a certain complexity: mundane and extraordinary, abstract and representational, disposable packaging and work of art.

“Some of the sculptures are based on a memory of artworks made for a movie shot in Los Angeles in 1981. One could say: the better prop, the closer we come to the real possibility of sculpture. And: the more convincing the sculpture, the more successful the little miracle of making an artist appear too.” –Peter Fischli

Scrawled by persons unknown, they appeared in public spaces around Zurich including park benches, building facades, cars, and houses. It is a latently aggressive yet ephemeral kind of rebellion, as the mark is only visible for a brief moment before it dissolves—an almost poetic reminder of transience.

The micro-vandalism is less an act of actual destructiveness than an act per se—a collectively planned and executed intervention that says, “I was here.”*

The mark becomes a signature.