The Art of Clean Up: Life Made Neat and Tidy

Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli takes objects and scenes from everyday life and organizes them by color, shape, and size into aesthetically satisfying images for your viewing pleasure. Some of the re-assemblies seem natural: a sandbox full of toys is cleaned up into orderly rows. A pine branch is disassembled and layed out into tidy rows of sticks and needles. All the laundry on a clothes line is arranged by color and size. Others get more abstract and extreme: A transit sign, for instance, is broken up into its component graphic parts. A crowd of kids milling about a schoolyard are layed out in rows, organized by the color of their shirt and their height, with their backpacks and scooters separately arrayed. A parking lot full of cars is reorganized into a tidier scene. A satisfying art book that may inspire you to see—and arrange—the mundane world around you quite differently.