Beschreibung:

Peter Fischli and David Weiss 4 Hostessen (4 Stewardesses) 1988 Plaster cast over polyester resin. 60 × 50 × 70 cm (23 3/4 × 19 3/5 × 27 3/5 in).
Provenance Galerie Susan Wyss, Zurich; Studio Trisorio, Naples; Galleria Marilena Bonomo, Bari Catalogue Essay "We do take steps to show things in their true light. Which is also what makes it interesting: we don't want to be rid of it altogether, but we don't want to leave it as it is either. That's true of many of our works: we want to take things out of the niche where they belong and transport them somewhere else, but without denying their origins. It is about taking but also about giving back." Peter Fischli For over three decades, the Swiss artistic duo Fischli and Weiss have consistently capitvated and amused audiences with their extraordinary transformations of the commonplace. Their videos, installations, sculptures, photographs and slide projections are all characterized by their playful and ironic examination of everyday life, albeit from the most absurd angles invariably portraying the banal in order to subvert the expectations of the viewer and to strike at the very conventions of art. Fischli and Weiss have explored the various social, theatrical, educational and creative roles of toys and play in contemporary society. The present lot, a retro grouping of four anonymous air stewardesses arranged in a tight diamond-shaped formation, is part of a body of work which also includes automobiles and in which the subjects were all cast in plaster with an unfinished, ghostly, dry whiteness. Reduced in size and frozen in space, their chalky blankness infuses their surrounding space with a disconcerting, eerie feel. Stripped of colour and of nearly every identifying feature, the women become strange maquettes – renditions of life lived in mute and black and white. "Play as analyzed by Freud requires toys that are simulacra of objects in the adult world: tools, for example, blunted in order to enable children to play at being grown-up and productive without hurting themselves or straining their limited strength; pails and shovels for the sandbox; toy stoves and plastic dishes for the girl's room; toy cars for the boys to crash and popguns to make them manly and brave; dolls to activate maternal instincts; lead soldiers to activate leadership; stuffed animals to give boys and girls alike a model of passive softness in those with whom they will sleep. Of course, there are toys of other sorts – games, athletic gear and the rest – which have the function of socializing the children into adult patterns (a responsibility sufficiently important to have made the manufacture and purveyance of toys a serious and profitable business). Most of these toys, needless to say, also afford the child plenty of opportunity for generating annoyance: squabbling over whose turn it is, making a racket, creating messes, hitting one another over the head, refusing to share, etc..." (A. C. Danto, ‘Play/Things', in Peter Fischli and David Weiss In a Restless World, Minneapolis and London 1996, pp. 98–99) Read More