Edizioni Conz

Daniel Spoerri, Erst letzt das erste, 1955, 1984, Silkscreen on cloth, 188 × 72 cm, Edition of 38

Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin

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Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930 in Galati, Romania) is a Swiss Romanian avant-garde artist, a member of Nouveau Réalisme, and a promoter of Eat Art. With his works, he has created modern-era Wunderkammers, in which ordinary objects are encapsulated and preserved in time and space. Throughout his life, Spoerri has worked in various professions: as a fruit salesman, tour guide, choreographer, and restaurateur. The core themes of Spoerri’s works emerged as early as the 1960s, proposing an ontological challenge to the nature of art and its inclusion in everyday gestures. Later, he turned galleries into restaurants and art critics into waiters, as in Restaurant de la Galerie J (1963). Connecting art and food under the heading of Eat Art, he founded a restaurant in Dusseldorf in 1968. Prominent among Spoerri’s experiments is the creation of tableaux pièges or “snare pictures,” comprised of used napkins, empty bottles, dirty plates and coffee cups, and overfilled ashtrays; allusive remnants that are left on a table at the end of a meal. Spoerri has been awarded honors, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris held two retrospectives (1972 and 1990). Recent exhibitions include those at the Museum Tinguely in Basel (2001), the Museum of Natural History in Vienna (2012), and the Musée Les Abattoirs (2017).