A master of rearranging and realigning consumer goods and cult objects of the 20th century, and playfully reinterpreting our era’s body of visual knowledge, artist Daniel Spoerri connects culturally unrelated objects, alienating them from their functionality, and placing familiar symbols into new contexts. In the early sixties, he sold standard store flour and sugar in the Copenhagen Addi Köpke gallery at its regular price; the sole difference being that a special caption was stamped on the label of the foodstuffs: “Caution: Artwork!”
Daniel Spoerri was born in 1930 in Galaţi in Romania, and since 1942 he has lived in Switzerland. In Paris, he studied classic ballet, and in 1954 he became the first dancer of the City Theatre in Berne. In 1957 he was the assistant to G.R. Sellner in the Landestheatre in Darmstadt, where he published the newspaper entitled “Material”, dealing with concrete poetry. Following his original activity in dance and theatre, Daniel Spoerri has focused intensively on visual art – or, as the artist himself prefers to say, he is “metteur en scène d'objets” – occupied with the arrangement of objects since 1960. In 1960, his first Tableaux Piège (Trap-Pictures) appeared. It was his friendship with Jean Tinguely and an experience in Copenhagen with Robert Filliou that led Spoerri to the invention of the genre of Tableaux Piège. He exhibited the remains of a last supper spent with Filliou in Copenhagen in a form of homage. He fixed the found objects, the plates left behind after dinner, with the remains of food, silverware, cigarette butts and personal items forgotten there, and then mounted them at an angle of 90º. This signified the realisation of the Trap-Pictures along the lines of Fluxus-happening.
At the same time, Spoerri joined forces with “Nouveau Réalisme”. In 1968 he opened a restaurant in his own name in the old town of Düsseldorf, shortly afterwards founding the first EAT ART EDITION. His culinary banquettes were extremely popular in the seventies. In 1978 he advertised a banquette with the title “Hommage à Karl Marx” with which he inaugurated a photo gallery. For this occasion, he invited all the Karl Marxes of the Reine region, and Spoerri’s students decorated the tables with candles and spangles, as well as small sand dunes.
Around 1978-79 Spoerri worked out his conception of “Musée sentimental”, which then resulted in the exhibitions he organised under the names of “La Musée sentimental de Cologne” in the Cologne Kunstverein, and the “La Musée sentimental Prusse” in Berlin. Among the items on view here were Heinrich Böll’s pencil, the miter of Cardinal Frings and the accoutrements of the working girls of a Cologne erotic centre. As professor of the Cologne Werkschule, in 1981 he created with his students an environment under the title “Alice in Wonderland”.
In the 1990’s, he settled in Tuscany, where, with the aid of a foundation established especially for the purpose, he has put on display by now seventy works in a sculpture park called “Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri”.
Within the material of the present exhibition, emphasis is given to his “Anatomical Cabinet” assemblages and his series of “Background-Landscapes” and “Carnival of Animals”, which define Spoerri as one of the leading figures of cultural cross-over of borders. This retrospective exhibition presents more than fifty ethnosyncretic objects and assemblages. The exhibition is now on view in Budapest as part of the Budapest Autumn Festival, following its presentation in the Kunsthalle Villa Kobe in Halle, the Kunstverein Lingen and the Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg. The exhibition, curated by Thomas Levy (Hamburg) and Dr. Vera Baksa-Soós, has been realised with the support of PRO HELVETIA.
