Swiss artist blurs the border between life and art

Visitors to Spoerri's exhibition can see the studio which once also acted as his workplace Keystone

The work of a Swiss artist who describes himself as a "theatre director of objects" is currently being exhibited at the Jean Tinguely museum in Basel.

Daniel Spoerri was born Daniel Feinstein in 1930 in Romania, and in 1942 fled to Switzerland with his mother, whose maiden name he now uses.

He came to art indirectly; his first creative work being in the fields of poetry and dance, but they already pointed the way to his pictorial work of the future.

In the 1950s, while working as a dancer and director at Bern’s Stadttheater, he discovered a talent for designing stage sets.

Spoerri went on to approach the visual arts as an autodidact in Paris, and his great interest in space and movement – as well as his friendship with Tinguely – led him to turn his attention to kinetic art.

In 1959 he initiated the Edition MAT (Multiplication d’Art Transformable), which was based on the idea of art multiples, the multiplication of art which constantly alters itself and is capable of modification.

His reconstruction of a room in a Paris hotel allows visitors to enter one of Spoerri’s worlds in the context of this exhibition. They can see the studio which once also acted as his workplace, display room and storeroom. Here the demarcations between art and everyday life are obliterated, not in the street but in the artist’s room.

His stated aim is to turn ordinary life into art and bring art into ordinary life, because as he puts it “the borders between art and life are blurred.”

For the last ten years Spoerri has lived in Tuscany, working in Seggiano on a sculpture park open to the public where nature itself becomes the stage set for his installations, and interacts with them.

swissinfo