TOUR: 'Happy Birthday Mr Spoerri!' Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris

TOUR: Happy Birthday Mr Spoerri!
galerie anne barrault

Galerie Anne Barrault presents the newest exhibition of Daniel Spoerri on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. On display are 9 works, like 9 candles. These works, achieved at various times, punctuate the expansive career of the artist through today, while he continues to create.

Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris

The following text was written by art historian Déborah Laks for Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, on the occasion of the exhibition Happy Birthday Mr. Spoerri! It’s original publication is on the gallery’s website as an introduction to both the exhibition and the history of Daniel Spoerri’s career.

The exhibition runs from August 29 - October 10, 2020 at Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris.

Daniel Spoerri "La realité est congruente avec l’imagination“, 2018 Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, France Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault and the artist. (c) Aurélien Mole — Daniel Spoerri
*"La realité est congruente avec l’imagination“, 2018*
Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, France
Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault and the artist. (c) Aurélien Mole

DANIEL SPOERRI: HI/STORIES AND GEOGRAPHIES

Daniel Spoerri was born on 27 March 1930 in Galati, Romania. He emigrated to Switzerland with his mother, brothers, and sisters after his father was killed in a pogrom in 1941. In Zurich, he debbled in various odd jobs until dance put an end to his drifting. And yet, from jazz cellars to the Bern opera house, his world still seemed too narrow. He left for Paris, with Jean Tinguely and Eva Aeppli. It was the las hurrah of the avantgarde : their ramshackle studios in the impasse Ronsin hosted the meetings, discussions, and enthusiasms of these young artists, exalted by the desire for a new life and a new art.

“My art, if you want to call it art, was to have discovered how to use these objects to make my own territory. ”

DANIEL SPOERRI (1)

This was the era of the fist snares that Spoerri laid for « the real ». After the avant-garde, dance, gestures and poetry, the world of objects opened its door to him. The artist tells of a visit to ironmonger with Tinguely, who helped him mark out a square meter on the ground, where unvalued trash and debris seemed to assume a form, almost to tell stories. Spoerri explored this connection between objet and narrative in the Topographie anecdotée du hasard, written in 1961. The 1960s were also the first period of the « snare picture », in which objets became witnesses to anonymous lives. Around these tables set at a 90° angle, gestures, discussions, and encounters still resound. For him, everything was a a question of territory, “My art, if you want to call it art, was to have discovered how to use these objects to make my own territory (…). Once, I saw everything stuck to the wall. And an incredible joy filled me (…). These objects were no longer sordid, the hotel room of someone who no longer knows who he is and lives in a wretched room… I was rich. (1.)” Once pinned or mounted on walls, objets became clues, they gestured towards the past, the elsewhere, the other. For Daniel Spoerri’s territories were above all human. The uprooted child, jostled from country to country, found his homeland with Jean Tinguely, Dieter Roth, Bernard Luginbühl, Robert Filliou, Raymond Hains, Meret Oppenheim, Roland Topor … All the important events in Spoerri’s life took place in the process of exchange.

On 27 November 1960 in Paris, he signed the Declaration constitutive du Nouveau réalisme. Even when he decided to burn his bridges, as in 1966, when he settled on the Greek island of Semi, he corresponded with his friends, asking them to send him recipes, and created from these, as well as his discoveries and local encounters, as review entitle Le Petit Colosse de Symi.

It was in Greece, far from the abundance of France’s Trente Glorieuses and the joy of consumption, that he discovered the mythopoetic profoundly of things, the way they accompagne lives, mediate gestures, relations and customs, and finally, embody an entire social and symbolic system.

From then on, his aim was no longer simply to capture situations but to recount them, even to create them. Several of his works are almost anthropological studies, like the Guide des fontaines sacrées de Bretagne, the product of a collaboration with historian Marie-Louise von Plessen, or more recently, the Pritzwiller idoles. The banquet he organised starting in the 1970s became a theatre of experiences as much concerned with food as with relations formed around shared meals.

Happy Birthday Mr. Spoerri! Install View 2020, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, France Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault and the artist. (c) Aurélien Mole — *Happy Birthday Mr. Spoerri!* Install View
2020, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, France
Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault and the artist. (c) Aurélien Mole

“The banquet he organised starting in the 1970s became a theatre of experiences as much concerned with food as with relations formed around shared meals.”

DÉBORAH LAKS ON DANIEL SPOERRI

So many different approaches to the human fact as it finds itself embodies in the universe of things. By inviting artist to exhibit at the Eat Art Galerie, which he founded in 1970, or in the Giardino of sculptures that he began building in 1990 in Italy, Spoerri embodied, in another way, the networks and friendships that shaped his life and career. When the Bern Kunsthalle offered him a retrospective in 1969, he accepted only on the condition that he could invite his friends to exhibit with him (2). The artist included himself in the sentimental geographies that he composed in his works – and, progressively, in the eyes of those who study his works – that territory whose proclaimed materiality goes beyond objets, places, and dates. When he recounts himself – and, above all, in his biography by Otto Hahn, written after a long series of interviews and discussions – his story is formed stitch by stitch, held together by the importance of its interstices.

Works, exhibitions or banquets focus the gaze, but we must also navigate in between, in the silences that give words their weights, in the emotion that colours meetings, and in the friendship that gives substance to artistic dialogues. Spoerri was aware of this, he who offered a course at the Munich Kunstakademie in « art hi/stories », intimate, sentimental, and anecdotical (aus dem Nähkästchen geplaudert).

Déborah Laks

(1) Cécile Debray (dir.), Le Nouveau réalisme [Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 28 mars 2007 – 2 juillet 2007, Hanovre, Sprengel Museum, 9 septembre 2007 – 27 janvier 2008], Paris, Éd. de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2007, p. 104.

(2) Freunde – Friends – d’Fründe : Karl Gerstner, Dieter Rot, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins und ihre Freunde und Freundesfreunde [exposition : Kunsthalle Bern, 3 mai – 1 juin 1969; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 26 juin – 27 juillet 1969], Bern et Düsseldorf, 1969.

Daniel Spoerri Happy Birthday Mr. Spoerri! is on view at Galerie Anne Barrault in Paris, August 29 - October 10, 2020. To learn more, inquire about works or schedule an appointment visit the gallery website here.

Rebeca LaliberteSeptember 29, 2020

TOUR: 'Happy Birthday Mr Spoerri!' Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris