Daniel Spoerri, the foremost exponent of Nouveau Réalisme and Eat Art, passed away on November 6 at 94. He dedicated his life to art and is celebrated as the most significant ‘object maker’ after Marcel Duchamp.
Throughout his career, Spoerri displayed the expressive capacity of the ‘ready-made’ in his countless projects, which reside today in some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Born in 1930 in Galați, Romania, Spoerri fled to Switzerland with his mother in 1942 to escape Nazism. His creative journey began in dance, where he served as the first dancer at the Berne Opera and studied under mime artist Decroux in Paris. His true artistic calling emerged in Paris at the iconic Hotel Carcassonne on Rue Mouffetard, where he, along with A. Jouffroy and A. Schwarz, initiated the celebrated ‘trap paintings’ or ‘tableaux pièges.’
These works used old crockery glued to vertical boards, creating three-dimensional still lifes that hung as paintings. They crystallised the scenes of a meal, capturing a lived moment. The significance of these agglomerations was not just their ephemeral visual appeal; they prompted observers to reevaluate their relationship with objects and appreciate the consumer’s role. Spoerri was a co-founder of the Nouveau Réalistes movement, established by Pierre Restany, alongside artists such as Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Fernández Arman, François Dufrêne, and Jacques Villeglé. He participated in the movement’s memorable final ceremony in Milan in 1970, creating a tiara-shaped cake for Restany at the Biffi Restaurant.
His name is mainly associated with the birth of Eat Art, referring to his trap paintings, which became part of the dining experience at his famous restaurant in Düsseldorf, established in 1968. Two years later, he opened a gallery above the restaurant to showcase ‘edible art’ exhibitions featuring artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, and Niki de Saint Phalle.
CHANGE was Spoerri’s motto; he was never satisfied with what was known and continually sought new artistic ideas. He promoted and directed numerous environmental exhibition projects, such as DyLaby at the Stedelijk Museum and The Cocrodome at the Centre Pompidou. His most complex project, the Daniel Spoerri Garden in Seggiano, Tuscany, became his masterpiece. This open-air museum houses over a hundred works, including sculptures and installations by artists worldwide. It is a three-dimensional autobiography celebrating artistic collaboration’s creative force and beauty while reflecting his cosmopolitan spirit and love for cultural, technical, and material contamination.
Spoerri was an irreverent artist, continually exploring the world with an insatiable curiosity that led him to experiment with multiple disciplines and artistic languages. His sculptures and installations, often made from salvaged objects or ethnographic materials, embody the poetics of the object rooted in the tension between symbolic value and triviality. His ‘ethno-syncretic objects’ from the 1970s and 1980s, which merge masks and tribal figures with elements of European popular culture, exemplify his ironic approach, revealing the absurdity and beauty of an increasingly globalised world. He was a multifaceted, unconventional artist—honestly, as art should be—a champion for the freedom of thought.
