Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri - Escape from Romania; training as a dancer with Étienne Decroux

Daniel Spoerri was born Daniel Isaac Feinstein in Romania on 27th March 1930. When his father Isaac Feinstein, a Protestant missionary with Jewish roots, was murdered by Romanian fascists in 1941, his mother Lydia Spoerri returned to her native Switzerland with her six children. There, her brother Theophil Spoerri supported the family, adopted little Daniel and enabled him to complete an apprenticeship as a businessman. Daniel Spoerri went on to try his hand at various professions, including photographer, fruit seller and bookseller, until Max Terpis finally suggested that he train as a dancer. From 1949 to 1954, Spoerri studied pantomime and classical dance in Zurich and Paris, with Étienne Decroux as his teacher for a time. Back in Switzerland, the Stadttheater Bern engaged him as a solo dancer, and his productions included plays by Jean Tardieu, Pablo Picasso and Eugène Ionesco. At the same time, Spoerri experimented with the medium of film and made short films as a director. He worked as an assistant to Gustav Rudolf Sellner at the Landestheater Darmstadt and gathered a group of Concrete poets around him, including Claus Bremer and Emmett Williams.

Object art à la Spoerri: Trap pictures and Eat-Art

Despite his success as a dancer, Daniel Spoerri was increasingly drawn to the visual arts. In 1959, he moved to Paris and made the acquaintance of Yves Klein, François Dufrêne, Jean Tinguely and Arman. Edition MAT, which he founded, published his first multiples, and he attracted particular attention with his tableaux pièges, the so-called 'trap pictures', with which he wished to capture a specific piece of reality as if in a trap. Object art became Spoerri's life's work and in 1960 he joined the Nouveau Réalisme group led by Pierre Restany, whose founding members included himself, Martial Raysse, Jacques de la Villeglé and Raymond Hains. From his trap paintings, he eventually developed an entire art movement, Eat Art, for the realisation of which he even ran his own restaurant in Düsseldorf's old town in collaboration with the Swiss restaurateur Carlo Schröter. Daniel Spoerri took the term 'culinary art' literally, inventing new dishes, staging cooking as an art event and transforming broken meals and leftovers into works of art.

Teacher, author and patron of the visual arts

Daniel Spoerri taught as a professor at the Cologne Werkschulen and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich; he published several cookery books which, on closer inspection, contained more art than recipes. In 1997, he opened his sculpture garden Il Giardino in Tuscany, where not only his own works but also those of artist friends found their place, and in 2015, opera director Bruno Berger-Gorski used a sculpture by Daniel Spoerri for the staging of two Israeli operas in Luxembourg and Bonn to commemorate the November pogroms. Daniel Spoerri has been married three times, including to the German photographer Vera Mercer. The artist has lived in Vienna since 2007.