Peter Fischli & David Weiss

After discovering a passion for jazz at the age of 16, he enrolled in a foundation course at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich, where in his first year of study he befriended fellow artist Urs Lüthi.

For most of 1975–78, he spent a great deal of time drawing in black ink, and had exhibitions at galleries in Zurich, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Rotterdam.

[4] Art critics often see parallels to Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth or Jean Tinguely in Fischli and Weiss' parody bearing work.

[7] By the end of the 1980s, the duo had expanded their repertoire to embrace an iconography of the incidental, creating deadpan photographs of kitsch tourist attractions and airports around the world.

For their contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale, at which they represented Switzerland, Fischli and Weiss exhibited 96 hours of video on 12 monitors that documented what they called "concentrated daydreaming"—real-time glimpses into daily life in Zurich: a mountain sunrise, a restaurant chef in his kitchen, sanitation workers, a bicycle race, and so on.

[8] For the Skulptur Projekte Münster (1997), Fischli and Weiss planted a flower and vegetable garden conceived with an ecological point of view and documented its periodic growth through photographs.

[13] In 1982, the artists began their ongoing series of hand-carved and painted polyurethane objects depicting ordinary items found in their studio.

[17] The resulting film enlists an assortment of objects, including tyres and chairs, as components in a domino-like chain reaction lasting thirty minutes.

Using such common industrial objects, Fischli and Weiss created a continuous chain of actions and reactions involving balloons deflating, tires rolling, liquids draining, candles melting, balls dropping, fuses burning, wheels spinning, and much more.

Reminiscent of the physical comedy of silent films starring Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, here the actors are steaming-kettles mounted on roller-skates, rotating dustbin bags, rickety stepladders set in motion, buckets, tyres, bottles and planks.

[19] Fischli and Weiss had previously declined offers to use their film commercially, and briefly threatened legal action against Honda for use of their ideas, although in the end no lawsuit was filed.

Others are the kind of pictures taken by amateur photographers, conventionally composed, sharply focused, with appealing subject matter such as woodland glades and sunlit gardens.

[22] Visible World exists in a number of other formats; as an artists' book and as an installation of fifteen light tables displaying a vast slide archive.

The encyclopedic collection of images – of cities, jungles, deserts, airports, stadiums, monuments, mountains, and tropical beaches, from all over the world – is composed of photographs taken by the artists over the course of fifteen years.

Examples include: "Can I restore my innocence?," "Why does the earth turn around once a day?," "Does a hidden tunnel lead directly to the kitchen?"

[33] Their works are held, among others, in the collections of the Tate, United Kingdom,[34] the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, and the Guggenheim, New York.