BUSINESS PARTNER
JEAN TINGUELY, 1925 – 1991
THE MASTER
Of Kinetic Art & Nouveau Réalisme
B
orn in 1925, in Fribourg, a city in Switzerland, Jean Tinguely grew up in Basel where he carried out an apprenticeship as a shop-window decorator in a department store during his teens. Aged fifteen, he enrolled in evening classes at the Art School (Kunstschule) where he studied under the tutelage of Julia Ris, who introduced Tinguely to the Dadaist collages of Kurt Schwitters, a German artist most commonly associated with the Dada movement. Schwitters’ Dadaist collages made of discarded ticket stubs, pieces of old newspapers and magazines, buttons, gears, and other objects assembled into compositions made a deep impression on Tinguely’s constructions. After World War II, he began painting in a Surrealist manner, but he soon abandoned painting to concentrate on sculpture made of junk.
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One of the most important artists in the development of Kinetic art, as well as Nouveau réalisme, Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor widely recognised for his thought-provoking and playful pieces that he liked to call metamechanics. Using ordinary everyday objects, rusty iron and waste material, he created a wide range of intriguing artworks that make barbed satirical points both about technological development and modern society. The leitmotif of his works is a movement that can be actively experienced both acoustically and visually
SCULPTURE BY JEAN TINGUELY Tinguely and his first wife, Swiss painter and sculptor Eva Aeppli, relocated to France in the early 1950s, where he became involved with the Parisian avant-garde movement, meeting artists such as Yves Klein, Arman, and Daniel Spoerri. They were part of the Nouveaux Réalisme (New Realism) which can be seen as a European counterpart to pop art. Subsequently, Tinguely began creating his most famous works - sculptural machines, known as metamechanics, which incorporated a vast array of materials, including wood, metal, fabric, gears, musical instruments, and found objects into moving or static constructions. Highly skeptical about the potential of technology to improve human life, he used his pieces made of industrial machinery to express an anarchic,
