Daniel Spoerri, visual artist and father of “Eat-Art”, has died

The Romanian-born Swiss artist, born in 1930 on the banks of the Danube in Galati (eastern Romania), was known for his three-dimensional still lifes linked to the art of the table.

Swiss visual artist Daniel Spoerri, one of the leading figures of the New Realism and father of the “Eat-Art”The Centre Pompidou announced on Wednesday that the artist had passed away. “We are deeply saddened by the passing of Daniel Spoerri, an emblematic figure and founding member of Nouveau Réalisme.”said the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art on X. “His unique take on art, through his “tableau-pièges” and unexpected assemblages, captured the instant, the ordinary and the surprising. His legacy will remain a singular source of inspiration and reflection.”continued the institution.

The Romanian-born Swiss artist, born in 1930 on the banks of the Danube in Galati (eastern Romania), is known for his three-dimensional still lifes linked to the art of the table. The principle is simple: at the end of a meal, Daniel Spoerri freezes traces of the meal (cutlery, plates, food scraps, packaging, etc.) by gluing them to the support. He calls it the “Eat Art works and actions featuring food and our eating habits. With this concept, the former dancer founded the “New Realism in 1960, alongside artists such as Yves Klein, Arman, Raymond Hains and Jean Tinguely.

Edible artworks

Daniel Spoerri went so far as to run a real restaurant in Düsseldorf (Germany) between 1968 and 1972, where customers who could afford it could leave with their own work. He doubled this initiative with the creation of the Eat Art Gallery, where artists such as Cesar, Ben and Arman exhibited edible ephemeral creations, while painters such as Pierre Soulages took part in some of his banquets.

But the artist will seek to rid himself of this label “artist of dirty dishes”.. In his series of “détrompe-l’oeilHe places a real object on a canvas or tapestry found at a flea market, and questions the boundaries between reality and illusion. His work has been the subject of retrospectives in numerous museums, including the Center Pompidou, Paris in the 1990s. More recently, in 2021, the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain (Mamac) in Nice devoted a major exhibition to him.

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