Peter Fischli and David Weiss are Swiss artists who first began working together in the late 1970s. Their sculpture, video and photographic works all generate a unique atmosphere of concentration and relaxed pleasure. The mood of the work ranges from the humorous - a clay figure group of 1981, for example, entitled Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction' - to the banal - a photographic series devoted to Airports - and even the apparently invisible - their Untitled installation simulating, through minutely detailed polyurethane sculptures, an unfinished exhibition site. While Fischli and Weiss occupy the international art world's most prestigious levels - representing Switzerland at the 1995 Venice Biennale and returning eight years later to win the Leone d'Oro prize for their slideshow Will Happiness Find Me? - they remain an unpredictable force at the very cutting edge of new art. This is the first true monograph on this extraordinary pair, who have exhibited worldwide, and whose solo exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988), and Tate Modern, London (2006). In his Survey, French critic and curator Robert Fleck looks at Fischli and Weiss' ability to resist conventional artistic categories, crossing fluidly between sculpture, installation, photography and the moving image. In the Interview Swiss critic Beate Sontgen discusses with the artists notions of sincerity and illusion, and examines the question of how literally viewers are asked to read their work. Noted art critic and leading authority on Fischli and Weiss Professor Arthur C. Danto examines in the Focus the immensely popular The Way Things Go, offering a new perspective on this well-known film. For Artists' Choice Fischli and Weiss have chosen a text by Robert Walser on the pleasure of walking that mirrors their own meanderings. Artists' Writings include unpublished scripts from early video works and a 1996 interview with the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Peter Fischli David Weiss (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

DANTO, Arthur C.

Söntgen, Beate

Fleck, Robert

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

Famed worldwide for his epically proportioned photographs, Andreas Gursky is one of very few contemporary artists able to represent cultures of excessive information--which he does through images of supermarket wares, crowds, trash, architecture and nature. The extreme detail of Gursky's final image--achieved by digital restructuring--produces a vertiginous effect on the viewer, as it oscillates between total representation and total abstraction. It could be said that Gursky updates the eighteenth-century sublime for our times. This publication surveys the artist's most recent creations, on display at the renowned Kunstmuseum Basel throughout the winter of 2007/2008. Two new groups of works in particular, one on Formula 1 races and the other on the famous Arirang Festival (a closely choreographed mass spectacle in North Korea's capital of Pyongyang), are gathered here.

Andreas Gursky

Zimmer, Nina

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz

"Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible." –Balthus
One of the last great 20th-century masters, Balthus pursued a path that ran exactly contrary to that of the modernist avant-gardes with which he was contemporary. At once quiet and intriguing, his paintings unite colliding contrasts, combining reality and dream, eroticism and innocence, practicality and mystery, the familiar and the uncanny in unique ways.
This volume, published for a retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, gathers around 50 key paintings from all phases of this legendary artist's career. It commences with the monumental masterpiece Passage du Commerce-Saint-André (1952–54), in which Balthus' intensive study of the dimensions of space and time and their relationship to figure and object is especially apparent.
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus (1908–2001), was born in Paris to Polish expatriate parents. He was raised in an exceptionally artistic milieu, with visitors to his household including Rilke (who became his mother's lover), André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard. Balthus was one of the few living artists to be represented in the Louvre, when his painting The Children (1937) was acquired from the private collection of Pablo Picasso.

Balthus

Bouvier, Raphaël

WENDERS, Wim

Kono, Michiko

Berggruen, Olivier

Burger, Christine

Guignard, Yves

López-Manzanares, Juan

This catalogue accompanies German artist Rosemarie Trockel's (born 1952) solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, including the artist's newer print works. Based on Trockel's sojourn in the area, this multimedia work focuses on the unique fashions, customs and cultural conventions of Bregenz.

Rosemarie Trockel

Dziewior, Yilmaz

Burton, Johanna

Pulitzer, Sam

Kunsthaus Bregenz

In Zilla Leutenegger's new book, the artist's main character, Zilla, is given her own voice. A very personal narration accompanies the adventures of this alter-ego character and explains works, drawings and installations in the style of a grown-up children's book.

Zilla Leutenegger: Zilla and the 7th Room

JRP|Ringier

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