Daniel Spoerri has been on the stage of the art world for seventy years. His surreal originality and his ironic gaze on the world have never stopped engaging and entertaining the mind of those who contemplate his works.
He fled with his family to Switzerland from Romania to escape the Nazi pogroms, in the 1950s he was principal dancer at the Bern Theater, then assistant director in Darmstadt. At the end of the decade, moving to Paris, he invented the MAT (Multiplication d’art transformable) editions: a project of his own creations and of his friends, including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, who called for the democratization of art thanks to works produced in multiple originals and so to speak “on demand”.
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New Realism
Still together with many of his fellow travelers, in the 1960s he was part of the light-hearted movement of the Nouveau Réalisme, then buried by the group of associates with a funeral banquet in Milan in 1970.In the heart of a convinced free hitter, Spoerri brought the his Eat Art becoming a creative gastronome among other things in Düsseldorf, and he was a pedagogue in various academies.
Assemblages
But it is with his passionate inclination to collect that he has been able to produce crowded assemblages praising detached visions of everyday life. And it is with his “trap-pictures” that he affirmed a joyful challenge to gravity, freezing, so to speak, tables set at the right moment of friendly conviviality in progress, immediately gluing where they were, used plates and half-full glasses, overflowing ashtrays , crumbs and serving dishes already plundered, crowding the tablecloths. By then hanging the tops of those tables on the wall, Spoerri immortalized the moment and allowed the observer of the finished work to evoke situations and narratives suggested by those dishes and those remains of food forever orphaned by the diners.
In Spoerri’s vast production, the variants of his three-dimensional paintings are innumerable and a large corpus is now at the center of the exhibition that the Kunstforum in Vienna is dedicating to the artist until June 27. Over 100 works from all stages of production tell of his artistic evolution, his interests, his predilections, gradually up to the latest assemblages made with everyday objects purchased mostly at the flea market in Vienna, a city chosen as a preferential residence. also dedicated to the Garden of Seggiano: the farm of 16 hectares in the Grosseto area, which Spoerri bought in 1997 and used as a sculpture park. Today there are over one hundred large, specially created by himself and by artists friends, and scattered in the hilly landscape. Flavia Foradini