The art of tidying up

The Swiss are often stereotyped as an orderly people, unstinting in their commitment to the application of rules but Ursus Wehrli has taken order to a different level.

The idea for his project "The Art of Clean Up" first took shape in a museum. "I found myself standing in front of a piece by the very messy Swiss artist Jean Tinguely. He's famous for putting all sorts of colours, material and objects on a canvas, like Jackson Pollock. So I tried to imagine what a cleaning lady would do if she had to clean up his studio. How far would she go? I imagined his workshop would be filled with all those different objects, paint and material, scattered on tables, on the floor and on the walls. How would she know where the mess ends and art begins? I enjoyed the idea that the cleaning lady would clean up everything – even the artworks – and would leave the room neat and tidy."

Ursus Wehrli has been "tidying up" art for 15 years rearranging our chaotic world and its everyday objects into neat rows, sorted by colour, size, shape, or type.