HUMLEBÆK.- This summer, visitors to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, can experience a new work by the Swiss artist duo Fischli/Weiss in the museum’s sculpture park: a snowman in a freezer! Snowman, as the work is entitled, has been acquired for the Louisiana’s collection and has been given a permanent location in the Sculpture Park.

Snowman is the second work by Fischli/Weiss in the Louisiana’s collection. The acquisition fulfils a long-standing ambition for the museum, made possible not least thanks to a donation from the New Carlsberg Foundation.

“For many years, it has been an almost unattainable ambition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art to present Snowman in the museum’s sculpture park. We owe both Peter Fischli and the New Carlsberg Foundation our sincere thanks for making it possible,” says Louisiana Director Poul Erik Tøjner.

David Weiss (1946–2012) sadly passed away in 2012, and it is therefore Peter Fischli who has been working out this version of Snowman for Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Another version of the work can be found at MoMA in New York, USA, at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, and at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia.

The freezer in which the snowman resides is powered solely by a solar panel installed at the museum. The snowman takes shape around an internal structure and is formed by water vapour periodically released into the freezer, where it crystallizes.





A fondness for childlike play, for the familiar and immediately accessible, and for the shared references of everyday popular culture is characteristic of the artistic practice of Fischli/Weiss. Their fascination with the snowman — not least children’s fascination with it — stems from the magical relationship between material and form: the way loose ice and snow can come together to create a body.

“A snowman is a popular ‘sculpture’ with a cultural history of its own. Its roots lie in both childhood idyll and fear. The Abominable Snowman frightens children, while the snowman’s slightly melancholic instability – dependent on the contest between the frost and the thaw – marks it out for eventual demise. There is still eternal snow somewhere in the world, but at our latitudes the snowman is under threat and can survive only in a freezer. And even there, there are days when it seems a little downcast,” says Poul Erik Tøjner.

The original idea for Snowman emerged as a proposal for a sculpture project at the Römerbrücke combined heat and power plant in Saarbrücken, Germany. Surplus energy from the plant was intended to power the sculpture, which in itself became a commentary on the relationship between technology, climate, nature and art. Fischli/Weiss developed the idea for Snowman between 1987 and 1989, but it was not until 2016 that versions of the work were realised in New York, Riehen and Brisbane.

Fischli/Weiss are already represented in the Louisiana’s collection by the widely beloved video work The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge, 1987), depicting a sequence of small, interconnected events.