Jean Tinguely
‚Machine Spectacle‘

Amsterdam

Jean Tinguely – the multimedia artist known for his extraordinary sculptures and machines – is honored by a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum. Machine Spectacle is showing the foremost pieces of the Swiss artist precisely twenty-five years after he passed away.

Sculptures, paintings, drawings, the corpus of Jean Tinguely is large, yet always inventive and coherent. His oeuvre challenges the academism contained within the art field. His sculptures that are useless machines made out of recycled materials form the core of his testimony. They are always witty, sensational and big scale. Machine Spectacle highlights these machines by showing the remarkable ‚Gismo‘ (1960) along with ‚Homage to New York, Etude pour une Fin du Monde No.1′ (Study for an End of the World No.1). Tinguely’s art is all about interaction and play with the audience as all of his machines need the help of the viewer to function. By doing so he encourages visitors to produce work themselves. The exhibition underlines the many collaborations Tinguely realized throughout his career with predominant artists of the 20th century such as Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle (who was also his wife) and Daniel Spoerri.

Along the retrospective, a two-day symposium will be hold at the Stedelijk Museum on the subject Love Yourself – A Symposium on Labyrinthine Exhibitions as Curatorial Model.

Jean Tinguely, Meta-mechanical sculpture untitled, 1954. Private Collection Potsdam. Photo: Christian Baur, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam, 2016.

Jean Tinguely with Méta-Matic No. 17 in front of the Eiffel Tower, 1959.

Stedelijk Museum

October 1, 2016 – March 5, 2017

Museumplein 10
1071 DJ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

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