This year, when Fischli/Weiss were awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize at the Museum Ludwig, the jury identified them as ‘among the most influential and perhaps ingenious artists in Switzerland’. Try ‘the world’. The pair’s 30-year, dazzlingly diverse enquiry into how we interpret reality has spawned countless direct and indirect imitations internationally, though few can match Fischli/Weiss’s knife-edge balance of humour and seriousness. Institutions worldwide love them, too: at the time of writing they have overlapping retrospectives in Munich and Kanazawa. Meanwhile, a new work made for the Ludwig – excerpts from live radio edited into a single faux-broadcast that steadily baffles its listeners – suggests they’ve hardly lost their touch vis-à-vis marvelously absurdist hermeneutics.
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Power 100
Most influential people in 2011 in the contemporary artworld
28

Peter Fischli & David Weiss
28 in 2011
- 201128
- 201031
- 200919
- 2008
- 2007

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