Peter Fischli, Ungestalten (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings and Gaga
In his wide-ranging oeuvre, artist Peter Fischli carefully observes and draws from the everyday world to create sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that address similar concerns to those explored as part of his collaborative practice with his late collaborator David Weiss. The artist’s work, so often centered around often overlooked, quotidian aspects of everyday life, sees him posing that same in an experimental and humorous way. For his current show, on now at the shared Reena Spaulings and Gaga exhibition space in Los Angeles, Fischli takes that interest towards a specific set of models: traffic lights.Â
Peter Fischli, Ungestalten (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings and Gaga
The show on view here continues Fischli’s intriguing fusion of concepts, moving between studied interpretations of occurring infrastructure and the artist’s own inclination towards the rough-hewn and deconstructed. The show here features a forest of traffic lights, hung at a variety of heights and dimensions and filling the gallery with a range of colorful, glowing lights. The room takes on a sense of space in suspension, the viewer prompted perhaps to stop and pause as traffic passes by, or to consider just how the movement is intended in the space. Fischli’s work often mines these sensations of movement and transit, with previous bodies of work exploring airports, gallery sites and other spaces of transit, movement and locality.
Peter Fischli, Ungestalten (Installation View), via Reena Spaulings and Gaga
Fischli’s work in this show creates something of a closed system within the gallery, a series of structures that seem to reference the external world while simultaneously taking those materials and locking them into peculiar new arrangements. Pressing the notion of a traffic system as both closed loop and referent to the grammar of the world outside the gallery, the artist’s work underscores shared systemic language and awareness.
The show closes April 1st.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Peter Fischli: Ungestalten [Exhibition Site]
