Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely (Fribourg, 1925 – Berne, 1991) brings movement, noise and the unforeseen into sculpture. Wheels, motors and mechanisms become the actors in a spectacle where humour coexists with unease. His machines do not illustrate industrial precision: they go awry, hesitate and change their rhythm, leaving an active role to chance.

Raised in Basel, he trained as a decorator and attended the school of applied arts. After making his first wire sculptures, he moved to Paris with Eva Aeppli at the end of 1952. In 1954, he exhibited his first motorised reliefs there, soon to be referred to as “Méta-mécaniques”.

The 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at the Galerie Denise René placed him at the heart of post-war kinetic research.

With the Méta-Matics, presented in 1959, the public could operate a machine that produced drawings. These interactive machines, patented by Tinguely, blurred the roles of the artist, the tool and the spectator. In 1960, Homage to New York pushed this challenge to the stable object further still.

Made from salvaged materials, the sculpture-machine was designed to destroy itself during an action at the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA exhibition notice gives 17 March as the date of the event; the label for the fragment preserved by the museum specifies that the machine was set in motion on the 18th. This surviving remnant shows how the work also endures through its documentation and memory.

Tinguely subsequently broadened his vocabulary with Heureka (1963–1964), created for the Swiss National Exhibition in Lausanne, and then with the Méta-Harmonies, musical machines that combine gears and percussion. In 1960, he signed the manifesto of the Nouveaux Réalistes, a movement attentive to objects and materials from everyday life. In Basel, the Musée Tinguely, inaugurated in 1996, preserves the largest collection of his kinetic works and makes it possible to observe their workings, sounds and changing effects.