September 11, 2025 – November 8, 2025Peder Lund is proud to announce its second exhibition dedicated to the renowned Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012). The exhibition brings together Flowers and Mushrooms (1997–2006), one of their most celebrated film works, alongside three arresting black rubber sculptures dating from 2012: Röhre aus Gummi (Tube of Rubber), Wand aus Gummi (Wall of Rubber), and Corner.
Since the early 1980s, Fischli and Weiss have produced one of the most inventive and influential bodies of work in contemporary art. Their practice, which spans film, sculpture, installation, and photography, is distinguished by its ability to elevate the ordinary into the realm of the extraordinary. By probing the overlooked details of daily life with both humor and rigor, they have left an indelible mark on the trajectory of postwar art history.
At the core of the exhibition at Peder Lund is Flowers and Mushrooms (1997-2006), a film composed of still images that unfolds in a hypnotic rhythm. The work functions as a "best-of" compilation drawn from four earlier slide projections — Sommer, Herbst, Pilze, and Fantasy.Originally created for their major retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern in 2006, which traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich, and Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this work is not simply a presentation of prior material, but a recontextualization that gives new coherence to these disparate series. The film reflects the artists' sensitivity to the cumulative power of image and sequence. In this way, Flowers and Mushrooms is both retrospective and generative: a reflection on their archive, and a work in its own right.
The work creates a haunting visual cycle of natural forms in bloom and decay, as the images oscillate between the delicate beauty of flowers and the darker menace of fungi, conjuring associations with transience, intoxication, and death. Flowers and Mushrooms reflects Fischli and Weiss's abiding interest in systems of classification. Like their other slide-based projects (Visible World, Views of Airports, Question Projections), it operates as a pseudo-anthropological archive, one that blurs the boundaries between science, amateur photography, and art. But where other series lean into deadpan humor or dry conceptualism, this work reveals a tenderness — a genuine engagement with beauty that is unafraid to approach the sublime. The film has been a centerpiece of several other major solo exhibitions of Fischli and Weiss's work, including at the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan in 2008; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in 2013; and the Aspen Art Museum in 2017. It is widely regarded as one of the duo's most significant meditations on the paradoxes of life and mortality.
Counterbalancing the fragile imagery of the film are three imposing black rubber sculptures: Röhre aus Gummi, Wand aus Gummi, and Corner. These works extend Fischli and Weiss's long-standing investigation into the banal, recalling earlier projects such as the Sausage Series (1979) and Suddenly This Overview (1981-2012), in which they used humble materials to reimagine everyday objects and moments. For the rubber works, the artists employed a conventional sculptural process — modelling in plaster before casting — but chose an unconventional medium: synthetic black rubber.
The result is at once familiar and disorienting. Rendered at a one-to-one scale, the sculptures in the gallery mimic ordinary forms of construction and architecture yet are stripped of their utility. Begun in the mid-1980s and developed in parallel to the artist's unfired clay sculptures, the black rubber sculptures from this series range in scale and subject matter, including such objects as dog bowls, drawers, tree roots, birds, ottomans, and even a functional record album. The dense, absorptive rubber carries with it connotations of mass production, industrial labor, and even fetishistic desire, transforming otherwise banal forms into mute and uncanny presences. Their blackened surfaces function almost like shadows — simulations of objects that no longer serve their original purpose, emptied of narrative and function yet charged with psychological weight.
The black rubber sculptures by Fischli and Weiss have been featured in a number of key institutional exhibitions, including the major retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, which subsequently traveled to Museo Jumex in Mexico City.
Placed in dialogue with Flowers and Mushrooms, the black rubber sculptures reveal Fischli and Weiss's ongoing fascination with transformation and doubleness: the ordinary made strange, the useful rendered useless, the beautiful laced with menace. If the film proposes a cycle of nature's vitality and decay, the sculptures underscore a parallel meditation on permanence and entropy in the manmade world. Together, they demonstrate the duo's capacity to destabilize aesthetic hierarchies and invite new ways of perceiving the everyday.
Solo exhibitions of Fischli and Weiss's work have been organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1992); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1996); Museu d'art contemporani de Barcelona (2000); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2003–04); Museo Tamayo arte contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005); and Tate Modern, London (2006–07). In 1995 and 2003, they represented Switzerland in the Venice Biennale, receiving the Leone d'Oro award for their 2003 submission. Their work also appeared in Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1987, 1997), and in Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum (2002–03) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003–04). Their work is owned by some of the most important institutions in the world.
With this exhibition, Peder Lund reaffirms its commitment to presenting seminal works by artists who have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of contemporary art. Following the gallery's first exhibition with Fischli and Weiss in 2010, we are proud to once again highlight the depth, humor, and philosophical resonance of their oeuvre, offering audiences a rare opportunity to engage with two defining strands of their artistic production.
ABOUT
After a twenty-year period of art dealership, Peder Lund’s extensive work with institutions and collectors in Norway and Scandinavia has enabled him to foster lasting relationships between his clients and internationally acclaimed artists. In November 2009, the decision was made to establish an exhibition program intending to broaden the dialogue with the Norwegian and Scandinavian public and enhance Oslo’s position in the global art consciousness, while keeping a close relationship with internationally acclaimed institutions and collectors.
The exhibition program reflects our longtime focus on internationally esteemed artists working within modern and contemporary art. The exhibitions are planned and executed in direct collaboration with the artists, artist estates, and their primary galleries. Recent exhibitions have featured work by Diamond Stingily, Mike Kelley, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sadamasa Motonaga, Ida Ekblad, Isa Genzken, Liz Larner, Ellsworth Kelly, Sturtevant, Dennis Oppenheim, Sergej Jensen, Dan Flavin, Yoshishige Saito, Richard Serra, Joe Bradley, James Lee Byars, Doug Aitken, Lucas Samaras, Jay DeFeo, Martin Creed, Louise Bourgeois, Catherine Opie, Philip Guston, Roni Horn, Robert Irwin, Constantin Brâncuși, Kazuo Shiraga, Fischli & Weiss, Bruce Conner, Franz West, André Kertész, Diane Arbus, Ugo Rondinone, Howard Hodgkin, William Eggleston, Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha, Terry Winters, Jonathan Lasker, and David Reed.
The artists chosen for the exhibitions have been widely shown in museum and gallery contexts, and the exhibition program reflects a comprehensive and varied outlook on the tendencies of the international art community.
Peder Lund
Tjuvholmen allé 27
0252 Oslo
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Gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday 12-4 pm.