Peter Fischli and David Weiss
A Swiss artist duo that collaborated beginning in 1979. For more than thirty years Peter Fischli and David Weiss collaborated on
a body of work that combines, rearranges, or otherwise manipulates the mundane into something new and unexpected.
Snowman (2016) is an updated version of a 1987 site-specific work by Fischli and Weiss that was commissioned by a German thermic
power plant whose energy—in the form of heat, paradoxically—was used to keep the snowman perpetually frozen. Though a snowman is,
as Fischli observes, a “sculpture that almost anyone can make” simply by rolling three spheres of snow and setting them atop one
another, Fischli and Weiss’s Snowman is dependent on a technically complex apparatus for its year-round subsistence. Over the
course of three decades of collaboration, Fischli and Weiss explored and exploited contradictions such as this one and
investigated the extraordinary potential of ordinary objects and situations.
