Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss artist and writer. A major theme of Spoerri's artwork is food, and he has called this aspect of his work "Eat Art". He is associated with the Fluxus movement of which his book, Anecdoted Topography of Chance, an annotated map of his room’s objects, is considered a primary example. Daniel has also created assemblage works, mounting objects on reproductions of 19th century medical illustrations as backgrounds.
Background
Daniel Spoerri was born on March 27, 1930 in Galati, Romania. He is the son of Isaac Feinstein and Lydia Spoerri. In 1942, his family emigrated to Switzerland. There, he was adopted by his maternal uncle Professor Theophil Spoerri and registered as Daniel Spoerri, a name he has retained.
Education
Since 1949 to 1954, Daniel studied classical dance in Zurich and Paris. Also, he studied art himself.
Career
In 1954, Daniel started to work as a lead dancer at the State Opera of Bern, Switzerland. During that period he met a number of Surrealist artists, including Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and also a number of artists, subsequently associated with the Fluxus movement, including Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth and Emmett Williams.
In 1959, Spoerri founded Edition MAT ("Multiplication d'art Transformable"), a venture, which produced and sold copies of three-dimensional constructed artworks.
The painter made his first picture in 1960, the same year he became one of the signatories of the New Realism manifesto.
On June 18, 1968, Spoerri opened the Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf, and on September 18, 1970, he opened the Eat-Art-Gallery upstairs. He also published in 1970 a diary of his life on the Greek island of Symi, in which he included numerous recipes of the dishes he ate there
Between 1978-1982, Daniel served as a lecturer at Cologne Academy of Fine and Applied Arts. During the period from 1983 to 1989, Daniel held the same post at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
In the 1990s, he created an extensive sculpture park Il Giardino in Tuscany, Italy.