For the first time, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice is dedicating a temporary exhibition to the artist Daniel Spoerri, a member of New Realism and close to Fluxus, and initiator of Eat Art.
Presented until March 27, 2022, this project is titled “The Theater of Objects by Daniel Spoerri” and takes visitors through the work of the Romanian-born artist, a collection of works he intended to be participatory.
The Daniel Spoerri “Journey”
Within the museum, the journey resembles a stroll as surprising and fascinating as that of a traveling theater, with its tricks and traps, its cabinets of curiosities, and its banquets. With nearly 300 works and documents, it offers a labyrinthine journey through the art of appropriation, from his first snare-pictures to the creation of unusual museums, including table and culinary art.
While Daniel Spoerri’s snare-pictures have become popular, the exhibition offers innovative insight into the artist’s work. It presents major historical works and archives from an original perspective, as well as lesser-known works that are equally pioneering and captivating.
The project brings together, across 1200m2, exceptional loans from major French public institutions: the Centre Pompidou-Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle; the Centre National des Arts Plastiques; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; the MAC/VAL-(Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne). Significant loans have also been granted by the Swiss National Library, which holds the artist’s archives, as well as by galleries, foundations, and collectors from France and Europe.
The Initiator of Eat Art
Daniel Spoerri is also the initiator of Eat Art, which integrates food into artistic creation. He invites acquaintances to eat a meal he has prepared himself, then, at the end of the meal, in the manner of his snare-pictures, he immortalizes the table. Utensils, dishes, and food scraps are glued as they are and tilted vertically. The food remains are resin-coated to prevent mold issues, explains Rébecca François, who adds that he sometimes signs these works “with ants.” These are then available for sale.
Daniel Spoerri, an Itinerant Artist
Daniel Spoerri with a transparent top hat filled with eggs, September 1964 Photo © Wieczorek / Ullstein bild via Getty ImagesBorn on March 27, 1930, in Romania, and a refugee in Switzerland, the artist dedicated himself to dance, theater, and concrete poetry before initiating a plastic art approach in 1959. While collecting scrap metal for his friend Jean Tinguely in Paris, he had the idea of gluing object situations as they were onto a support, which he then stood upright, fixing a random moment in time.
Daniel Spoerri is an itinerant artist: he constantly travels across Europe. Today, he divides his time between his garden in Tuscany, opened in the 1990s, his foundation/exhibition house near Vienna, inaugurated in 2009, and his apartment in the Austrian capital.
His work is recognized on the international scene. He was celebrated in 1972 by the CNAP in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1990, the Centre Pompidou dedicated a retrospective to him, which toured Antibes, Munich, Vienna, and Geneva. The Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2001, the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2002, the Centre Pecci in Prato in 2007, and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2017 have all held major exhibitions and events. Present in the MAMAC collections, his work is the subject of a major exhibition in Nice for the first time. Not to be missed.
More information: The Theater of Objects by Daniel Spoerri exhibition, until March 27, 2022, at MAMAC, Place Yves Klein – 06300 Nice. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 AM to 6 PM.
