Daniel Spoerri:
Digesting the Past ‒ Eat Art and Object Art
Opening:
2018 Sep 13, 17:00
On view:
2018 Sep 14 2018 Nov 30
Program:
11 a.m. – 7 p.m., except Mondays and holidays

+ The event is part of the pulzArt 6 Contemporary Arts Festival program series.


Daniel Spoerri (1930) started his artistic career as a ballet dancer, then he tried his luck in the world of the theater and literature. Still, he became world famous in the field of fine arts, when at the age of thirty he created his first snare pictures (tableau-piège): the usual remains, after meals, of dirty dishes, empty glasses, ashtray and cigarette buds fixed on table, chair or other kind of support which, turned from their everyday, horizontal into vertical position, hang on the wall as pictures.

Connecting the dining scene with fine arts did not stop there: at the beginning of the seventies Spoerri already figured in the Western European common consciousness as the notorious founder of the artistic trend called Eat Art.

However, Eat Art was not the final stage of his artistic activity. In the course of his long life, the always restless Spoerri, always capable of renewal, roamed in several countries of Europe and incorporated into his works several known or unworthily forgotten artistic products of our culture. His immediately recognizable assemblages created from a multitude of objects or his Musée sentimental set up in Paris, Basel, Köln and Salzburg turn him into a first-rank archaeologist of our postmodern world.

We also have to mention Spoerri the sculptor, who cast in bronze his own former mansard room from Paris in its entirety – those interested are recommended to visit the artist’s sculpture garden in Italy: in the Giardino di Daniel Spoerri, roaming among the olive trees of Tuscany, one hundred groups of sculptures of him and his artist friends can be sought out.

Daniel Spoerri was born in Galaţi as the son of Isaac Feinstein, of Jewish origin, and the Swiss Lydia Spoerri, who acted as Christian missionaries. In 1941 Feinstein lost his life in the pogrom in Iaşi. It took a whole year until Lydia Spoerri could leave the country with her six children.

Our exhibition, which focuses on Eat Art and cultural archaeology inherent in Spoerri’s object art, is the first one presenting the artist’s original artworks in Romania.

Gergely Ligetfalvi


Special thanks: Barbara Räderscheidt, Susanne Neumann, Váncsa Domokos, Judit Mihály, Mihály Vargha, Olga Stefan, István Tamás, Melinda Bagoly, Judit Pieldner, Martin Pieldner