BOOK:Alexander Calder & Fischli/Weiss,Cantz Publications

From 29/5/16 through 4/9/16, the Fondation Beyeler is presenting a comprehensive exhibition devoted to American artist Alexander Calder and Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, who worked as partners under the name of Fischli/Weiss. The exhibition offers a distinctive new perspective into Calder’s work and focuses on the fleeting, precarious and exhilarating moment of fragile balance as expressed through the works of Calder and Fischli/Weiss in the early and late20^th Century, respectively.

By Efi Michalarou

With Calder’s groundbreaking invention of the mobile in the early 30’s, and Fischli/Weiss’s collaborative creative work from 1979 onwards, these artists each lent the theme of fragile balance an iconic form of a very different kind. At first glance, both positions could hardly be more different; later, however, they proved to be two sides of the same coin, the result of different perspectives on the same theme at different times. The elaborately designed, richly illustrated catalogue with accompanying essays provides extensive insight into both oeuvres. Alexander Calder ranks as the master of equilibrium in modern art. With his pioneering invention of the mobile in the early ‘30s he reimagined the ever-shifting balance between gravity and weightlessness. What makes his work so fascinating is to see how the search for balance and the attainment of equilibrium and its visualisation in multifarious shapes and modes. Beginning in 1979, Peter Fischli and David Weiss gave the theme of precarious balance quite a different kind of iconic form in their works. With the same vigorous indefatigability, they developed an irresistible interaction of balance, clarity and overview in their films and sculptures, as well as through language, photography and painting, even though the uncertainties they create frequently gain the upper hand over the elegance and self-confidence of the big gesture of Modernism, as embodied by the mobile.