Tools '85, 1985
Metal, Hardware, 36" x 24"
Jean Tinguely was born in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1925 and died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1991. Though Tinguely was best known for his whimsical motorized constructions, he was also a painter, a draftsman, and a designer of stage sets. From 1941 to 1945 he took classes at the Basel School of Fine Arts, Switzerland, and in 1945 he made his first constructions, executed in wood, paper, and wire. He also produced a series of “edible” pieces made out of grass. In 1953 he moved to Paris, where he was a principal participant in the city’s postwar art scene. In the late 1950s he joined the New Realism movement, which also included Yves Klein, Arman, and theorist Pierre Restany, exhibited at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, France, in 1958. In 1960 he captured the attention of the art world with his self-destructing mechanical piece, Homage to New York, which destroyed itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1961 and 1962 he participated in “happenings” with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Tinguely’s wife, French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle. Throughout his life he continued to execute large-scale commissions, including the fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris (in collaboration with his wife) and a gargantuan sculpture in the Fontainebleau Forest in Paris. A 1990 show in Moscow, Russia featured a 17-foot high piece called Altar of Western Affluence and Totalitarian Commercialism.