Daniel Spoerri is the artist who rearranges the utility and cult objects and playfully re-evaluates and reinterprets the visual knowledge of the 20th century. He links objects that do not go together culturally. He puts well-known symbols into new context through functionally alienating objects. At the beginning of the sixties, he was selling common flour and sugar at standard price in Copenhagen in Addi Köpke’s gallery, the only difference being the additional script on the label of the goods: ‘Caution! Piece of Art!’ Simultaneously, he joins “Nouveau Réalisme”. In 1968, he opens a restaurant under his own name in the old town of Düsseldorf and shortly afterwards establishes the first ‘Eat Art Edition’. His culinary banquettes were extremely popular during the seventies. The banquette, which inaugurated a photo gallery was called “Hommage á Karl Marx”. He invited to the occasion all the Karl Marx namesakes living around the Rhine. Apart from candles and spangles, Spoerri’s students decorated the tables with small sand-hills. At the end of the sixties, as the creator and foremost representative of Eat Art, he exhibited edible pieces of art made of gingerbread dough, and thus the neo-dadaist group of nouveau réalisme was broadened by a new trend – beside the body art of Yves Klein and the anti-machineries of Jean Tinguely. It was his friendship with Jean Tinguely and a Copenhagen experience shared with Robert Filliou that hinted him the genre of “Trap Pictures”. He exhibited the leftovers of his last dinner with Filliou in Copenhagen as a type of homage. He fixed the objects found, the dishes, the food remains, cutlery, cigarette buts, and the forgotten personal objects left on the table after the meal and exhibited them 90 degrees inclined. This was the realization of the Trap Picture in the Fuxus happenings. Between 20th April and 12th October 1992, the exact remainders of the 1991 dinners had been exhibited in the Swiss pavilion of the Sevilla World Expo. Like for example Sevilla-Serie Nr.2. as well.
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1–2–3: The Collection in Focus – 3rd Floor Exhibition Space 16. November, 2007 – 2. May, 2010
This is the first time since the initial exhibitions of the Ludwig Museum in 1991 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996 that the Museum’s own collection has been put in full focus.