Exhibitions / Altri Fiori e Altre Domande / Overview

Palazzo Litta
Corso Magenta 24, Milan - Italy
January 30 – March 16, 2008

From January 30th through March 16th, 2008, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents Altri fiori e altre domande, the first retrospective in Italy of Swiss artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss.

Installed in the rooms of Palazzo Litta – a seventeenth century mansion that thanks to the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi opens its doors to contemporary art for the first time - Fischli & Weiss’ exhibition is a unique occasion to discover the work of two of the most celebrated innovators of contemporary art.

For Altri fiori e altre domande the artists have completely reconfigured parts of their traveling retrospective – organized in collaboration with Tate Modern and Kunsthaus Zurich – adding new works and seminal, rarely seen pieces, which are presented in a site-specific installation. Bringing together more than forty works, Altri fiori e altre domande is specifically conceived for the monumental spaces of Palazzo Litta.

Fischli & Weiss have created an exhibition that insinuates throughout the Palazzo, leaving its decors and atmospheres untouched, while staging a series of intimate encounters and extraordinary confrontations with their work. As in Fischli & Weiss’s oeuvre, Altri fiori e altre domande blurs the border between normality and the exceptional, turning the building into a dollhouse of the absurd.

Fischli & Weiss have been working together since 1979, imposing themselves as the prophets of an art of childish amazement, ferocious skepticism and primal stupor. In their photos, sculptures, films and installations, the Swiss duo casts an enchanted look upon the world, revealing its banal beauty and its astonishing dullness. At the same time consummate philosophers and court jesters, Fischli & Weiss combine severity with lightness, mixing the power of imagination with the rigor of a mad scientist. Suspended between the sublime and the dull, between paranoia and enchantment. Fischli & Weiss’s works are explosions of shapes and colours, sudden illuminations and abrupt descent into obscurity – a bizarre encyclopedia of precious paradoxes and secret affinities.

With Altri fiori e altre domande the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi presents an exhibition that is at the same time introspective and retrospective, a unique combination of historical and original works, in one of the most significant and fascinating buildings of the city of Milan.

Always searching for new occasions to connect contemporary art with new audiences and unusual spaces, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi reinvents the city, its monuments and historical sites through the works of today’s most interesting artists.

Altri fiori e altre domande celebrates the first five years of Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s new commissions. Since 2003, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has been producing new ambitious works and site specific exhibitions installed in historical sites and public spaces in the city of Milan.