Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri (Galați, 1930 – Vienna, 2024) transforms the ordinary traces of existence into visual events. Abandoned objects, the remains of a meal or tools become witnesses to a situation arrested in time. His work questions what we preserve, what we forget and how a shift in our gaze can bring a story to light.

His career spans several disciplines: dance, stage direction, writing, publishing and the visual arts. In 1959, he founded the Éditions MAT, which contributed to the development of artists’ multiples. The following year, he took part in Nouveau Réalisme and created his first tableaux-pièges, at the heart of an enquiry that brought the work closer to the concrete materials of everyday life.

The principle consists in fixing objects in the arrangement in which they were found. When the horizontal support is raised against a wall, familiar things change their status. The viewer now observes a table or a group of objects as an image, while also perceiving their material presence.

Chance intervenes in the initial situation; the artist decides the moment at which it becomes a work of art.

Les Boîtes, an assemblage from 1961 held at the Centre Pompidou, brings together tools, papers and various objects on a wooden panel. This work reminds us that tableaux-pièges extend beyond the sole motif of the meal. At the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Aktion Restaurant Spoerri.

Tableau-piège, from 1972, preserves, by contrast, the remains of a table from his Düsseldorf restaurant, opened in 1968.

With Eat Art, Spoerri made food and its consumption an artistic field in its own right. Banquets, encounters and objects thus extended a reflection on the ephemeral and memory. His archives, donated in 1996 to the Swiss National Library, testify to this prolific activity.

Discovering Spoerri invites us to pay attention to the modest traces that surround us: they can become clues to a vanished human presence.