Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present Polyurethane Objects, the fifth exhibition by Peter Fischli (*1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012).

In the early 1990s, after a long run of projects dominated by travel, photography, appropriated materials, and interventions into public space, Peter Fischli David Weiss finally returned to the dirty work of making things by hand in the studio. But now, as they considered the site and context of this labor with fresh eyes, their flair for self-reference led them to methodically replicate the very conditions of such labor, resulting in a series of installations that would become hallmarks of their oeuvre. Returning to an old favorite among their material repertoire, they began to carve blocks of polyurethane foam into copies of the items populating their studio as well as the back rooms of the museums and galleries in which they exhibited: cleaning supplies, tools, paint cans and mixing buckets, rolls of tape, wooden pallets, pipes and containers, as well as furnishings (chairs, a cot, a desk, a small refrigerator, even a stove) and the personal items that one might find left on them (cassette tapes, six-packs of beer, a skateboard, a towel, a toothbrush and so on). Cannily subverting the accepted norms of art production, in which invisible labor merges with creative genius to transform raw materials into prized works of art, Peter Fischli David Weiss instead foregrounded the markers of work and workplace as fetishes in themselves (Nat Trotman, ed., Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better, New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2016, p. 201).