Galleries in Paris » Daniel Spoerri

SPOERRI – ANNE BARRAULT

Galleries — Sat, 29 Aug 2020 15:04:57 +0000

Gallery Anne Barrault is pleased to present the new exhibition of Daniel Spoerri on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday.
The visitor will discover 9 works, like 9 candles. These works, achieved at various times, punctuate the career of this great artist until today, while he goes on creating.

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 avant- garde : 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.

This was the era of the st 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 rst 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 lled 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 rich1. 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 nally, 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.

So many different approaches to the human fact as it nds 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 him2.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

SPOERRI – BARRAULT

Galleries — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:47:11 +0000

Daniel Spoerri : Hi/Stories and Geographies

Daniel Spoerri was born on 27 March 1930 in Galati, Romania. He emigrated to Switzerland wit 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 ends his drifting. And yet, from jazz cellars to the Bern opera house, is world still seemed too narrow. He left for Paris, with Jean Tinguely and Eva Aeppli. It was the las hurrah of the avant-garde : their ramshackle studios in the impasse Ronsin hosted the meeting, discussions, and enthusiasms of these young artists, exalted by the desire for a new life and a new art.

This was the era of the st 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 tell stories. Spoerri explored this connection between objet and narrative in the Topographie anecdotée du hasard, written in 1961. The 1960s were also the rst 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 lled 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 rich1. 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.

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 nally, embody an entire social and symbolic system.
From then to on, his aim was no longer simply to capture situations but to recount them, even to create the. 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 starring in the 1970s became a thereof experiences as much concerned with food as with relations formed around shared meals.

So many different approaches to the human fact as it nds 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 Kundersthalle offered him a retrospective in 1969, he accepted only on the condition that he could invite his friends to exhibit with him2.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 Kunstakademic in « art hi/stories », intimate, sentimental, and anecdotical (aus dem Nähkästchen geplaudert).

Déborah Laks

LE VAISSEAU D’OR – VALLOIS

Galleries — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:46:53 +0000

With Gilles Barbier, Bianca Bondi, Alice Guittard, Matthieu Haberard, Charlotte Heninger, Edward Kienholz, Benjamin Loyauté, Gaspard Maîtrepierre, Lucie Picandet,
Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri

Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!
Arthur Rimbaud, extract from « Adieu », in A Season in Hell, April-August 1873, as translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row.
Exhibitions are born for thousands of reasons and one of them is sometimes a matter of friendship. From time to time, it is a question of elective affinity, this complex process that takes root in the history of medieval alchemy «to explain the attraction and fusion of bodies». (1) For my part, I have never wanted an exhibition to be too explicitly a slave to a subject. On the contrary, I prefer that it allows us to mix artworks that then become like beings and which, in some cases, produce a new aesthetic material, at the heart of the athanor. We do experiments, we do exhibitions, not presentations. We tell stories. It is all about letting your mind waver, like when you walk from gallery to gallery on a weekday with your fists in your pockets. Anger, drunkenness, snapshot of contrasts.

But at the local café, we realize that galleries are perhaps like borders, beaches or cliffs at the corner of the street, that separate us from the mainland of our urban boredom. Rare places in the city where anything remains possible.
From this beach, therefore, it seemed possible to show something of the bowels of this great golden ship, with multicolored flags, of which Rimbaud speaks.

Let the artists invent this excavation, in the present, all in the same boat: when it runs aground and breaks open, they invent themselves. So yes, come new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages. Let everything connect on the immaterial sand of the gallery. Whether they are known or not, it doesn’t matter, since they recognize each other. Careers, all mixed up, are as many fantastic journeys as history forgets, transforms into legends, or into posterity. This great golden vessel moves away obliquely as one approaches it: it multiplies and pulverizes to float better, like an intuition.