Daniel Spoerri

Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri creates sculptures and installations immortalizing objects from daily social encounters. Along with Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, Spoerri was one of the founding members of Nouveau Réalisme (“New Realism”), a movement founded in 1960 by the critic Pierre Restany in which reality was a medium in itself—artists took everyday objects and discarded refuse and combined them to make sculpture, installation, and performance in an antidote to burgeoning consumerism. 

While collecting scrap iron for Tinguely, Spoerri began gluing random objects he found in flea markets—especially drawn to the end-of-day leftovers—to the wall in elaborate assemblages, improvising art from chance. These early “Flea Market Carnivals” led to the creation of Spoerri’s well-known “Snare Pictures” in the 1960s, assemblages of detritus left on the table at the end of a meal. The collections of used napkins, empty bottles, and dirty plates are anti-monuments to this simple act, reflecting Spoerri’s long-standing interest in dissolving the boundaries between art and life. 

Spoerri covered the restroom at Luna Luna with a facade that resembles Classical architecture, in front of which he placed a pair of three-dimensional victory columns holding large piles of fake, steaming excrement.

For over six decades, Spoerri has pioneered the Eat Art movement with projects spanning handwritten recipes, palindrome menus, banquets, and an entire restaurant in Düsseldorf (Restaurant Spoerri) serving foods arousing delight, surprise, or disgust among audience members. Spoerri also designed Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri in 1997, a sculpture park with the work of numerous artists in Seggiano, Tuscany. 

Spoerri covered the restroom at Luna Luna with a facade that resembles Classical architecture, in front of which he placed a pair of three-dimensional victory columns holding large piles of fake, steaming excrement. Inside the installation, empty teacups, half-finished bread and cookies, and dirty silverware covered the pink walls surrounding the toilets.

For Luna Luna, Spoerri reimagined the public bathrooms by designing them to resemble architect Albert Speer's “Reich Chancellery,” the Nazi Party’s building headquarters. Spoerri mocks and devalues Speer’s designs by naming his artwork Crap Chancellery, emphasized by two piles of steaming sculpted feces on the bathroom’s entrance columns.