Short ZERO-Biography of Daniel Spoerri

 

Daniel Spoerri, born on March 27, 1930 in Galati, Romania, initially studied dance and worked as a ballet dancer in Paris and Bern between 1952 and 1957. As early as 1956, however, he gradually turned away from dance and, after a brief episode as an assistant stage director, toward the visual arts. In 1959 he participates with his Autotheater in the exhibition Vision in Motion – Motion in Vision in the Antwerp Hessenhuis, in which Heinz Mack and Otto Piene are also involved. Many of the later ZERO artists participated in his Edition MAT (1959), which contained multiplied originals, primarily kinetic objects, in the cheapest possible form.

In Spoerri’s works, everyday objects play a major role. This is also the case in his Fallenbildern (trap paintings) from the 1960s, through which he became known. He is also a co-founder of Nouveau Réalisme and made a name for himself as the founder of Eat Art, in which leftovers from meals are frozen into snapshots and fixed on a support.

 

Further literature: Anekdotomania. Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri, hrsg. von Museum Jean Tinguely Basel, Ostfildern-Ruit 2001.

 

Photo: Hartmut Rekort