Flowers and Mushrooms
Flowers & Mushrooms is a hallucinatory double-exposure portfolio by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, bursting with saturated color that navigates the fine line between beauty and kitsch.
Working between 1997 and 1998, Fischli and Weiss spent countless hours photographing gardens and mushroom patches, layering the images into superimposed double exposures that dissolve petals, stamens, berries, weeds, and fungi into vivid fields of color. The photographs first appeared as an artist's book published for the pair's 1999 exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; this edition reprints that 160-page softcover in full, with 40 color plates printed on folded, unbound sheets.
Fischli (b. 1952) and Weiss (1946–2012) worked together from 1979 until Weiss's death, building a body of work — from the film The Way Things Go to their rubber and polyurethane sculptures — on a deadpan slippage between the mundane and the absurd. Flowers & Mushrooms extends that sensibility to still-life photography, treating two of art history's most conventional subjects with a strain of hallucination distinct from either.
