Daniel Spoerri

He trained as a classical dancer under Olga Preobrajenska and became a lead dancer at the Bern State Opera in 1954^[1], but by the end of the decade he had moved to Paris and settled into Room 13 of the Hôtel Carcassonne on the Rue Mouffetard, using the cramped space as home, studio, and gallery. It was there, in 1960, that he produced his first Tableau-Piège (snare-picture): at the end of a meal, he glued every remaining object to the tabletop and hung the board vertically on the wall, so that plates, cutlery, and leftover food appeared to defy gravity. The first of these, *Kichka's Breakfast*, is now in MoMA's permanent collection. Early viewers, confronted with photographs of the work, reportedly assumed the objects had been painted on, the conceptual leap that the detritus of life could itself be art was not yet obvious.

Spoerri was a founding signatory of Nouveau Réalisme on 27 October 1960^[1], alongside Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Arman. His contribution to the movement was a natural extension of his snare-pictures: a conviction that the real world, consumed and used, was already saturated with meaning. This led logically to Eat Art. In 1963 he turned a Paris gallery into a functioning restaurant, with critics as waiters and the meal's leftovers becoming raw material for new work. By 1970 he had opened the Eat-Art-Gallery in Düsseldorf above Restaurant Spoerri, arguing that eating was itself a performative act. The 1964 snare-picture commemorating a meal with Marcel Duchamp sold at auction in 2008 for €136,312.

His 1962^[1] publication *An Anecdoted Topography of Chance* catalogued 80 objects on his Hôtel Carcassonne table at a precise moment, 3:47 p.m. on 17 October 1961, each annotated with personal digressions. Emmett Williams translated it into English in 1966 and it became a cult classic of conceptual writing. A 1990 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou toured five European venues. He spent his final decades at Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri, the 16-hectare sculpture garden he created near Seggiano in Tuscany in 1997, which holds works by Nam June Paik, Meret Oppenheim, and Dieter Roth. He died in November 2024^[1], aged 94.