‘Eat Art’ Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri has died

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Spoerri is considered the founder of the ‘Eat Art’ movement. The keen cook first asked guests to leave dirty cutlery and plates with leftovers at the end of a meal back in 1959. He immortalised the accidental arrangement with glue and hung it on the wall.

This resulted in numerous works, known as ‘snare pictures’, which caused a furore at the time. The Breakfast of Kichka I was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

+ Read how Spoerri blurred border between life and art

In 1968, he opened a restaurant in Düsseldorf and also ran the Eat Art Gallery there, where he organised banquets. A number of his artworks were also created there after the food was served.

Together with the artist couple Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle and others, he signed the Manifesto of New Realism in 1960. The group used trivial objects to question concepts such as ‘art’ and ‘artwork’. The concept was a counter-movement to the informal painting that dominated Paris and Pop Art that was emerging in the United States.

Asylum in Switzerland

Spoerri was born Daniel Feinstein in Galati, Romania, in 1930. His father was murdered by Romanian fascists in 1941. A year later, his mother Lydia Spoerri, a Swiss national, fled to Zurich with her six children.

Here and in Paris, Daniel Spoerri trained as a ballet dancer and mime artist and performed at the Stadttheater Bern for several years. Among other things, he choreographed a ballet of colours for which Jean Tinguely, with whom he had been friends since 1950, designed a moving stage set.

However, he also devoted himself to literature, specifically visual poetry and publishing. At the end of the 1950s, Spoerri founded Edition MAT (Multiplication d’art transformable) in Paris and distributed reproductions of works by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp at a standard price of CHF200.

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Spoerri also worked as a teacher and museum founder. At the end of the 1970s, he collected objects from the city’s history in Cologne together with students from the University of Applied Sciences for Art and Design and realised the ‘Musée sentimental’.

He died in Vienna on Wednesday, according to Wolfgang Sabath, Managing Director of the Spoerri exhibition centre in Hadersdorf am Kamp in Austria.

Adapted from German by DeepL/mga