Background
Jean Tinguely was born on May 22, 1925 in Fribourg, Switzerland. He was the son of Charles Célestin Tinguely, storekeeper for the Kohler Company, and Jeanne Louise Tinguely-Ruffieux, a maid.
1958
Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein at the courtyard of Impasse Ronsin with "Excavatrice de l'espac"’ and "La Vitesse totale"
1962
Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely in Paris
Jean Tinguely was born on May 22, 1925 in Fribourg, Switzerland. He was the son of Charles Célestin Tinguely, storekeeper for the Kohler Company, and Jeanne Louise Tinguely-Ruffieux, a maid.
Since 1941 till 1945, Jean studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Basel under the tutelage of Julia Ris. There, he discovered Kurt Schwitters’s Dadaist work, which would have a great influence on his constructions.
In 1953, together with Daniel Spoerri, a Romanian dancer and artist, Jean Tinguely planned a live event, called the Autothéâtre (Automatic theater), a performance, that would use a mechanical set, designed by Tinguely to move coloured shapes and objects around a stage without human performers. In the late 1950s, Jean created a series of automatic drawing machines, called "the Meta-Matics", which use chalk or markers to create abstract works of art through a mechanized process. His constructions, which combine junk sculpture with kinetics, are often witty, humorous and ironic, owing a great deal to the Dadaist legacy of anti-art.
In 1960, Tinguely carried out his famous "Homage to New York", in which his site-specific sculpture was intended to self-destruct in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art. Even though the sculpture did not completely destroy itself, it the attention of American audiences and led to collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg on his Experiments in Art Technology project.
On October 27, 1960, together with Yves Klein and other artists, Tinguely signed the manifesto of a new group, who called themselves the Nouveaux Réalistes. Tinguely marked the group’s tenth anniversary by staging his major auto-destructive performance, a work called "La Vittoria", in front of Milan Cathedral in 1970.
During the 1970s, Jean started to work on a series of fountain projects. Some time later, in 1981, he began to incorporate animal skulls into his art. His first machines to feature built-in bones and skulls were shown at the exhibition, organised by the automotive group Renault in June 1981. Despite his assertion, that the skulls lent emphasis to the burlesque element, they are also symbolic of his own growing preoccupation with death. This awareness of his own mortality is also evident in works like Inferno, which Eberhard Kornfeld exhibited at his gallery in Bern in late 1984. The skulls, like Tinguely’s ever more extensive use of consumer products and neon tubes, became a defining characteristic of his late works of the 1980s.
Jean's passion for Formula 1 car racing is reflected in some of his key works of this period. His "Fontaine Jo Siffert", erected in Fribourg in the spring of 1984, is a tribute to the racing driver, Jo Siffert, who died on the racetrack. In 1988, Tinguely combined racing car components and bones to build the work "Lola T 180 – Mémorial pour Joakim B.", created in memory of his friend, the racing driver Joakim Bonnier, who was killed in 1972.
There was a posthumous exhibit of his work in 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, followed later that year by the inauguration of the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland.
Also, Jean Tinguely took part in different important exhibitions, including the exhibition "Le mouvement", devoted to Kinetic art, at the Galerie Denise René in Paris.
Machine à dessiner No. 3
Radio-Skulptur
Méta-mécanique
Homage to New York
Méta-Matic No. 14
Mautz II
Méta-Matic No. 6
Le soulier de Madame Lacasse
Frigo Duchamp
Baluba
Char MK
Suzuki (Hiroshima)
Translation No 1 - pour un triangle
Wundermaschine - Méta-Kandinsky I
Ecrevisse
Santana
Spirale (Rörelse)
Jean Tinguely perceived junk as an essential part of the experience of an urban industrialized society.
Quotations:
"I can assure you, that once you get rid of the notion of art, you acquire a great many wonderful new freedoms."
"One has complexes. One has the art complex. One goes to the School of Fine Arts and catches the complexes."
Jean married Eva Aeppli, an artist, in 1951. Some time later, in 1960, the couple divorced. In 1971, he married his second wife Niki de Saint Phalle, a painter and sculptor.