Daniel Spoerri, Risk-Taking Artist Who Made Eating an Art Form, Dies at 94

Daniel Spoerri, an artist whose experimental work involved offering bizarre meals, unappetizing foods, and generally confusing culinary situations, died in Vienna on Wednesday at 94. His death was announced by Ausstellungshaus Spoerri, a museum devoted to him in Hadersdorf am Kamp, Austria.

Spoerri gained a following during the 1960s with works that involved the act of eating, often as a means of bridging the gap between art and life. His jokey, risk-taking art was often intended to upend bourgeois norms during a time of social upheaval in Europe.

Alongside artists such as Arman and Jean Tinguely, he was among the artists affiliated with Nouveau Réalisme, a French avant-garde that dedicated itself to utilizing ready-made objects in art. Doing so, they asserted, was a way of showing that art was, in fact, directly related to the world at large.

During the early ’60s, Spoerri began making work from the remainders of meals. Rather than washing the dishes and tossing out the detritus that surrounded them, he glued the soiled plates, half-smoked cigarettes, and emptied cans to boards. A self-classified “paster of found situations,” Spoerri called these works “tableaux pièges,” or “trap paintings.” Sometimes, these works even hung on walls, as though they were similar to any other abstract painting of the era.

At times, Spoerri even functioned like a trickster, intentionally snaring his viewers in situations that would befuddle them. In 1963, when dealer Rudolf Zwirner offered Spoerri an exhibition at his Cologne gallery, the artist responded to the invitation by hosting a one-night-only event. There were, in fact, works hung on the walls—but they vanished within minutes, exactly the time it took for Spoerri to hard boil an egg on site during the opening. Zwirner once recalled that six paintings sold in just four minutes, after which the guests were treated to a dinner of bugs, worms, and other animals, along with omelets that he cooked with them.

Daniel Feinstein was born in 1930 in Galati, Romania. In 1941, his father was deported to a Nazi concentration camp and later murdered there, causing his mother, who was Swiss by birth, to move Feinstein and his six siblings to Zurich, where he took his uncle’s last name of Spoerri.

Initially, he intended to become a dancer, studying at the Zurich Theatre Dance School and later joining the Bern City Theatre. But through that theater, he came to know artists such as Meret Oppenheim, an important Surrealist, and that set him on a different course. By 1960, he had also met Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.

Having done his “tableaux pièges” of the early ’60s, Spoerri began to craft what he called Eat Art. He opened a restaurant in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he cooked up projects that were frequently laced with class commentary. With an intentional focus on the “cuisine of the world’s poor,” Spoerri’s Eat Art relied upon a short list of cheap ingredients. He later opened Eat Art gallery, where colleagues such as Joseph Beuys, Robert Filiou, and Dieter Roth exhibited food-oriented artworks of their own.

Spoerri continues to gain international acclaim in the intervening decades, producing artworks that involved appropriating others’ paintings, then appending various objects to them. He was the subject of various surveys, including a retrospective at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, in 2001.

He did not always seem comfortable with the positive attention he got. He once told Artrust, “I had to wait decades before someone said ‘Oh, that’s beautiful!’ When I started, everyone said ‘Horrible! Who would put such a thing on the wall?’”