Peter Fischli / David Weiss. Are Animals People

This exhibition by Peter Fischli (Zurich, 1952) and David Weiss (Zurich, 1946) organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, brings together a selection of pieces made by the artists themselves and centers around the protagonists in their first works, Rat and Bear. Present at different moments throughout Fischli and Weiss’ career, these characters have enabled them to question art as an alternative system of knowledge by positioning themselves with distanced irony on a thin line between fiction and reality.

The artists work with a wide range of techniques to construct banality, common objects and places, as well as perceptions of time. They draw from humor, absurdity, distance and ingenuity as tools to achieve this. Building on estrangement allows them to reflect in greater depth on trivial matters without apparent meaning while they approach more sublime subject matters with a sense of humor.

The work speaks to transforming common places, revising everyday reality and banality. Toward this end, the artists have relied on investigating and observing their own surroundings, providing an inversion of values and hierarchies vis-à-vis reality. Even if the works do not have an explicit moral, they display and produce different situations, sometimes with the use of many stimuli and other times, with suggestive puns that encourage reflection from their viewers.

Peter Fischli, David Weiss
Are Animals People?