Zoom

Restaurant Spoerri : Tableau piège

1972

Daniel Spoerri

Mixed media

70 x 70 x 25 cm

Mixed technique on wood under plexiglass

Spoerri freezes time by gluing objects, such as leftovers from meals, just like he finds them when he starts working. Using the same technique, he also glued flea market displays and discarded materials crammed into a drawer. In 1963, Spoerri began collecting meals at Galerie J. while in contact with George Maciunas and Fluxus. Next, he opened a Spoerri restaurant in Düsseldorf in 1968, serving meals he personally prepared, followed by Eat-Art Gallery, where customers and artists were invited to make edible art, such as Richard Lindner’s gingerbread characters or César’s candy canes.

Daniel Spoerri

Swiss

Born in 1930

Born in 1930 in Galati, Romania, Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss plastic artist. He died in 2024 in Vienna.

He got introduced to the art world through dance, which he practised during his studies at the Zurich Opera School of Dance, and in several courses, notably with dancer Olga Preobrajenska and mime Étienne Decroux. He started his career at the Bern Opera from 1954 to 1957, where he became the principal dancer, before devoting himself to theatre as a director, actor, mime, and set designer. In 1957, he founded “Material,” a journal for concrete poetry and fine art, in cooperation with Josef Albers, Louis Aragon, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Eugen Gomringer, and Dieter Roth.

In 1960, he invented his first “Tableaux-pièges” by gluing on planks everyday objects found in his hotel room—objects turned into something unusual by passing from the horizontal to the vertical plane. This work led him to join the New Realist group when it was founded in 1960. He declared: “I only put a bit of glue on a few objects, I don’t indulge in any creativity.” In 1972, the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Paris held a retrospective of his work. He was inducted as a member of the Berlin Academy of Art in 1984.