David Weiss, from the Swiss artist duo Fischli / Weiss, has died

David Weiss (1946-2012), the Swiss artist who began collaborating with Peter Fischli in 1979, has died at the age of sixty-six. The artists, noted for their wry wit and deadpan irony, gained prominence for adapting a plethora of media, including sculpture, film, and photography, into a body of work that manipulated representations of their daily experiences, causing the incidental to become poetically iconographic.

In 2003, Fischli and Weiss won the Golden Lion Prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale for Questions, an installation that included over one thousand photographic slides of handwritten existential questions the artists collected over a number of years. The artists first contributed to the Venice Biennale in 1995, exhibiting what they called “concentrated daydreaming” via ninety-six hours of video on twelve monitors, featuring vignettes of daily life in Zurich—a mountain sunrise, a bicycle race, a chef in his kitchen. Their fixation with the banal was cemented toward the end of the 1980s—when the artists started photographing kitsch tourist attractions and airports—and served as a bedrock of their artistic practice over the ensuing years.

“With Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the way things go is that they take time: not necessarily ‘actual’ time, but possibly the contemplative relation one could have with time,” Rirkrit Tiravanija noted in his introduction to an interview with the artists in the Summer 1996 issue of Artforum. A Fischli and Weiss retrospective was held in 2006 at Tate Modern, of which Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote: “In love with the facts, laws, and randomness of existence, [Fischli and Weiss] have shown that resolute pursuit of the Duchampian/Johnsian ideal of using anything and inventing nothing leaves art at least as wide open as life itself.” Both lived and worked in Zurich, also the city where Weiss was born in 1946.