Swiss perspectives in 10 languages

‘Eat Art’ Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri has died

Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri 1930-2024
Danial Spoerri found fame portraying everyday items in his art Keystone-SDA

Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, known for his artworks using leftover food with dirty cutlery and crockery, has passed away in Vienna at the age of 94.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Spoerri is considered the founder of the ‘Eat Art’ movement. The keen cook first asked guests to leave dirty cutlery and plates with leftovers at the end of a meal back in 1959. He immortalised the accidental arrangement with glue and hung it on the wall.

This resulted in numerous works, known as ‘snare pictures’, which caused a furore at the time. The Breakfast of Kichka I was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

+ Read how Spoerri blurred border between life and art

In 1968, he opened a restaurant in Düsseldorf and also ran the Eat Art Gallery there, where he organised banquets. 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. The group used trivial objects to question concepts such as ‘art’ and ‘artwork’. The concept was a counter-movement to the informal painting that dominated Paris and Pop Art that was emerging in the United States.

Asylum in Switzerland

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 artist and performed at the Stadttheater Bern for several years. Among other things, he choreographed a ballet of colours 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 CHF200.

More

More

Saving contemporary art from self-destruction

This content was published on Man-made materials crack, spare parts for sculptures disappear and audio-visual equipment becomes obsolete. The use of untested or degradable materials, new media, performances and conceptual art since the 1970s has transformed the profession of art restoration and introduced new specialisations. It has also become more complex with questions surfacing of whether all contemporary art should…

Read more: Saving contemporary art from self-destruction

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 realised the ‘Musée sentimental’.

He died in Vienna on Wednesday, according to Wolfgang Sabath, Managing Director of the Spoerri exhibition centre in Hadersdorf am Kamp in Austria.

Adapted from German by DeepL/mga

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.

Popular Stories

Most Discussed

News

No Swiss bank in phase with environmental objectives

More

Swiss banks failing environment, says WWF

This content was published on None of the 15 major Swiss retail banks is meeting international climate and biodiversity targets, according to a ranking by WWF Switzerland.

Read more: Swiss banks failing environment, says WWF
UNRWA provides emergency assistance to just over one million Palestine refugees, or about 75 per cent of all Palestine refugees in Gaza, who lack the financial means to cover their basic food.

More

Lazzarini: no alternative to UNRWA in Gaza

This content was published on The only alternative to the UN Palestinian agency’s work in Gaza is to allow Israel to run services there, Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner-General, told reporters in Geneva on Monday.

Read more: Lazzarini: no alternative to UNRWA in Gaza

In compliance with the JTI standards

More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!

If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR

SWI swissinfo.ch - a branch of Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR