Artists

David Weiss

Press release

Melas Martinos is pleased to present a selection of works from the Neocolor series by Swiss artist David Weiss (1946-2012) produced between 1977 and 1978. In these works on paper, the artist first applied fields and stripes using Neocolor wax crayons, then coated the surface with black paint and scraped away the top layer with a fine nib in a grattage technique to reveal the underlying composition of bold, vivid strokes and lines. Revealed from a dark overlay, the colourful motifs vary from playful abstraction to figuration, collectively shaping a series of different nightscape scenes. During a time when Weiss was living on Zähringerstrasse in Zurich's Niederdorf neighborhood, the series captured the emerging 'counter-public' subculture within Zurich's art scene, reflecting the energy, desires, and ambitions long constrained by the rigid norms of the city's public spaces. David Weiss was born in Zurich in 1946. He attended the Zurich School of Art and Design until 1964 and then studied sculpture at the Basel School of Art and Design. Weiss met Peter Fischli in 1979 and formed the artist duo Fischli/Weiss, which remained active until Weiss' death in 2012. The pair took part in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1995, 2003, 2013) and retrospectives at Tate in London (2006) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2016). In recent years, Weiss's independent work has been presented in solo exhibitions staged by the Swiss Institute in New York (2014), the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur (2014), Weiss Falk in Basel (2021), the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York (2019, 2022), and the Taro Nasu Gallery in Tokyo (2023).