
About Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri studied classical dance and mime in Paris. In 1954 he was first dancer at the Bern Opera. He staged several avant-garde plays, taught mime and jazz choreography and directed several studies for the experimental theatre.
In the late 1950s he founded the periodical Material whose initial number was the first international anthology of concrete poetry.
In 1959 he started Edition MAT, a series of art objects produced in limited editions.
One year later Pierre Restany invented the name ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’ for a group of artists, including Klein, Tinguely, Arman, Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne, Raysse, De Saint Phalle, Christo, César, Rotella, Deschamps, and Spoerri became one of them.
Around that year he made his first Tableaux-Pièges or ‘Snare Pictures’: objects found in chance positions were fixed (snared) as they were. Since the result was called a picture, what was horizontal became vertical. Example: the remains of a meal were fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed, and the table hung on the wall.
In the late 1960s Spoerri started a restaurant in Düsseldorf, where from 1970 his Eat Art Gallery was housed.
Daniel Spoerri collaborated with the Italian publisher Francesco Conz for many years. Best known is their series of cookery books with receipts by Spoerri, and illustrations by friends as Dieter Roth, Roland Topor, Alfred Hofkunst and B.J. Blume.