Jean TINGUELY

Born in Fribourg in 1925 and died in Bern in 1991, Jean Tinguely was one of the leading figures of kinetic art and Nouveau Réalisme. Raised in Basel, he trained at the School of Arts and Crafts before moving to Paris in 1952 with Eva Aeppli, where he soon became involved with the avant-garde.

From his earliest mechanical sculptures, Jean Tinguely made movement a central element of his work. Wheels, motors, belts and salvaged materials gave rise to unstable, poetic and deliberately absurd machines which playfully questioned the world of industrial production. His participation in the 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise René established him as one of the pioneers of kinetic art.

In 1959, his celebrated Méta-Matics, machines capable of producing drawings themselves, wittily challenged the respective roles of the artist, chance and the viewer in the creative process. The following year, Tinguely took part in the founding of Nouveau Réalisme around the critic Pierre Restany and created Homage to New York at the Museum of Modern Art, a monumental machine designed to destroy itself.

Deeply influenced by the spirit of Dada, Jean Tinguely developed an artistic language based on movement, sound, accident and appropriation. His collaboration with Niki de Saint Phalle led to several major works, including Le Cyclop at Milly-la-Forêt and the Stravinsky Fountain, created in Paris in 1983 near the Centre Pompidou.

Alongside his sculptures, Jean Tinguely’s drawings, lithographs and prints form an important part of his work. Rapid lines, diagrams, handwritten notes and machine projects extend the energy of his constructions onto paper. Throughout his career, Tinguely transformed the machine into an object that was at once playful, fragile and critical, creating one of the most distinctive artistic languages of twentieth-century contemporary art.