The food artist Daniel Spoerri has died at the age of 94
Published: Thursday, Nov 7th 2024, 11:00
Updated At: Friday, Nov 8th 2024, 00:59
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Daniel Spoerri became famous for his paintings of leftover food with dirty cutlery and crockery. He died in Vienna at the age of 94, the managing director of the Spoerri exhibition house in Austria confirmed to the German Press Agency.
Daniel Spoerri was born Daniel Feinstein in Galati, Romania, in 1930. His father was murdered by Romanian fascists in 1941. A year later, his mother Lydia Spoerri, a Swiss national, fled to Zurich with her six children.
Here and in Paris, Daniel Spoerri trained as a ballet dancer and mime and was then a soloist at the Stadttheater Bern for several years. Among other things, he choreographed a ballet of colors for which Jean Tinguely, with whom he had been friends since 1950, designed a moving stage set.
However, he also devoted himself to literature, specifically visual poetry and publishing. At the end of the 1950s, Spoerri founded Edition MAT (Multiplication d'art transformable) in Paris and distributed reproductions of works by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp at a standard price of 200 francs.
Finally, Spoerri also worked as a teacher and museum founder. At the end of the 1970s, he collected objects from the city's history in Cologne together with students from the University of Applied Sciences for Art and Design and used them to create the "Musée sentimental".
Eating place in Hadersdorf
Twenty years later, in 1997, he donated his archive to the Swiss National Library (now the National Library) and laid the foundation stone for his own sculpture garden, "Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri", in Seggiano in Tuscany. His own works can be found here alongside those of his friends: Eva Aeppli is just as present as Bernhard Luginbühl, Meret Oppenheim, Dieter Roth and Jean Tinguely.
In 2009, Spoerri transferred two properties in Hadersdorf am Kamp in Lower Austria to a non-profit foundation, which are used as a restaurant, event and exhibition venue under the name "Eat Art & Ab Art". The artist has lived in Vienna since 2007.
The head of government of the federal state of Lower Austria, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, has now paid tribute to him as a "great exceptional artist" and "master of the fine arts". The newspaper "Kurier" first reported on his death.
Spoerri himself, on the other hand, said in 2019 after the release of a documentary about him: "I don't think I've become anything significant at all". He only does "what I think I have to do from day to day."
Art made from leftovers
Spoerri is considered the founder of "Eat Art". He was an enthusiastic cook and first asked guests to leave dirty cutlery and plates with leftovers at the end of a meal back in 1959. He immortalized the accidental arrangement with glue and hung it on the wall. This resulted in numerous works, known as trap paintings, which caused a sensation at the time. "The Breakfast of Kichka I" was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1968, he opened a restaurant in Düsseldorf and also ran the Eat-Art-Gallery there, where he organized banquets and happenings. A number of his artworks were also created there after the food was served.
Together with the artist couple Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle and others, he signed the "Manifesto of New Realism" in 1960. These were primarily object artists who used trivial objects and wanted to question concepts such as "art" and "artwork". The group saw itself as a counter-movement to the informal painting that dominated Paris and the Pop Art that was emerging in the USA.
In Switzerland, Spoerri was last prominently represented in 2020 in the exhibition "Amuse-Bouche. The Taste of Art" at the Tinguely Museum in Basel. Part of the exhibition was the short film "Ressurrection" (1968). The film takes us backwards from human poop to the bloody plate, the frying pan, the butcher's shop, the slaughterhouse, the cow in the pasture and the final cow patty. With this experiment, the artist succeeded in alienating the desire for meat long before the social discussions about veganism.
As a gifted chef, he was able to redirect taste sensations. His "Eat Art" resulted, for example, in the "Menu Travesti: mashed potato ice cream with meat pralines", which he presented in the magazine "Twen" in 1970. His aim was to encourage readers to make completely different discoveries. For Spoerri, eating was a pleasure and a social act. He also used it to create works of art that could be hung on the wall. This places him prominently in the canon of everyday art.
He died in Vienna on Wednesday, according to Wolfgang Sabath, managing director of the Spoerri exhibition house in Hadersdorf am Kamp in Austria.
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