Daniel Spoerri artworks and editions

Daniel Spoerri is one of the most famous Swiss object artists. He is considered the inventor of Eat-Art, is a founding member of the "Nouveaux Réalistes" and has also worked as a dancer, poet and director. It was especially his "trap paintings" that made the Swiss-Romanian artist famous.

Daniel Isaac Feinstein was born in 1930 as the son of a missionary of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in Romania. After his father was deported and murdered by the Nazis, the family managed to escape to Zurich in the midst of the war in 1942, where they registered under his mother's maiden name.

In Zurich, Spoerri met artists such as Eva Aeppli, Max Terpis and Jean Tinguely. However, before dedicating himself to the visual arts, he studied at the Theater Dance School, moved to Paris on a scholarship, and in the mid-1950s became involved as the first dancer at the Bern City Theater. During this time he befriended artists such as Claus Bremer, Andre Thomkins, Bernhard Luginbühl, Claus or Dieter Roth. Spoerri gradually turned away from dance and moved back to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Jesus-Rafael Soto, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.

Spoerri's biography as a visual artist began with a decisive pictorial idea that helped him achieve his artistic breakthrough: he developed so-called tableaux-pièges ("trap pictures"), which are still-life-like assemblages of everyday objects. He fixed food scraps and used dishes to solid supports, such as tabletops, which he then attached vertically to the wall as a tableau-piège without legs. These were frozen snapshots with which he secured a permanent place in art history as the inventor of "Eat-Art". The artist alienates everyday objects, questions consumer society, and changes levels of perception and reality by tilting from the horizontal to the vertical. His paintings and works are meant to inspire contemplation while questioning everyday things and their meaning.

With his call for a fusion of life and art, as well as with the exaggeration of his own relics, Spoerri approached the Happening and the Fluxus movement. Furthermore, he is the founder and member of the "Nouveaux Réalistes" in Paris, a programmatic group of artists. In the 1960s, the Swiss founded the Eat-Art Editions and opened a restaurant in Düsseldorf. Here numerous actions and banquets took place. Spoerri himself appeared as a master of culinary art and served Eat Art to the public. He also opened the Eat-Art-Gallery, where renowned artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, César or Dieter Roth, were invited.

Spoerri is also active as a stage designer, director, poet or filmmaker. From 1978 to 1982 Spoerri is a professor at the Cologne Werkschulen and from 1983 to 1989 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. After that, the artist again focuses on his own work. In the 1990s he begins to build his sculpture garden "Hic terminus haeret - Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri", which was recognized as a foundation and officially opened in 1997.

Spoerri is considered a master of assemblage, the inventor of Eat Art, and has created an extensive and varied oeuvre that corresponds to his conception of art and communication. The numerous purchases of his artworks and editions by international museums, the countless exhibitions and retrospectives dedicated to him, consolidate his position as a central figure in post-war European art.