Alexander Calder & Fischli / Weiss

The American artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) and Swiss artists Peter Fischli (*1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) have sought and found quintessential ways of rendering a moment of fragile balance in art—a temporary state at once precarious and propitious. With Calder’s groundbreaking invention of the mobile in the early nineteen thirties, and Fischli/Weiss’s collaborative creative work from 1979 onwards, these artists each lent the theme of fragile balance an iconic form of a very different kind. At first glance, both positions could hardly be more different