Sale: 534 / Contemporary Art Day Sale, Dec. 09. 2022 in Munich Lot 172

 

172
Daniel Spoerri
Guerriers de la nuit, 1982.
Golden Bronze on black stone base
Estimate:
€ 50,000 / $ 54,000
Sold:
€ 56,250 / $ 60,750

(incl. surcharge)
Guerriers de la nuit. 1982.
Golden Bronze on black stone base.
Except for two works signed and numbered on the helmet. From an edition of eight copies. Dimensions incl. stone base ca. 89 x 15 x 40 cm (35 x 5.9 x 15.7 in). up to a maximum of 148,5 x 110 x 100 cm (58,4 x 43,3 x 39,3 in).
Complete series, however, the number of one object deviates from the numbers of the others. [AW].
• Spoerri is one of the most important Swiss contemporary artists.
• Next to Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri was a co-founder of the "Nouveau Réalisme" in 1960.
• Impressive complete series.
• The artist participated in a first group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961
.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Italy (acquired directly from the artist).

Daniel Isaac Feinstein was born the son of a Norwegian-Lutheran missionary of Jewish descent in Romania in 1930. In 1942 he fled with his Swiss mother and his siblings to Zurich, where the family took their mother's maiden name. After Spoerri had first studied classical dance in Paris from 1949 to 1954, he worked as a dancer at the Stadttheater Bern, where he staged, among other things, a surrealistic drama by Pablo Picasso. From 1956 on he gradually turned away from dance and worked as assistant director at the Theater Darmstadt for two years from 1957. He got to know artists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Robert Filliou. In 1959, he returned to Paris and devoted himself to visual arts. Alongside Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, he is one of the founding members of "Noveau Réalisme".
After he had become famous for his so-called "Snare Pictures" in the 1960s, he devoted himself to bronze sculptures in the following decade. In 1990/91, Spoerri began his project for the 16-hectare sculpture garden "Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri" in Seggiano, Tuscany, Italy. "Hic terminus haeret" ("Here is the border") was the chosen motto attached above the entrance gate in red iron letters. The garden was recognized as a foundation by the Italian Ministry of Culture, and officially opened its gates in 1997. It currently offers 113 installations by a total of 55 artists. This garden is also home to a work from the present group "Guerriers de la nuit" from 1982. Spoerri himself said about this work that it was a series of heads without bodies in the form of hat models, with meat grinders as teeth. He calls them "warriors" and provides them with martial elements such as hay sticks, scythes, horns or herb knives. According to Spoerri, the bronze material underscores the unity of the group and is also a very weather-proof material. The aspect of unity is of particularly great importance to the artist, as he himself emphasized: "By having it cast in a single material, there was much more unity and I wanted to show that I intended to make independent sculptures and an array consisting of of several objects." (Daniel Spoerri, quoted from: Hic Terminus Haeret – Fondazione Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri, works by Daniel Spoerri at the Giardino, no. 13, in: https://www.danielspoerri.org/giardino/de/artist/daniel-spoerri/#works-group-12-1). [JK]



172
Daniel Spoerri
Guerriers de la nuit, 1982.
Golden Bronze on black stone base
Estimate:
€ 50,000 / $ 54,000
Sold:
€ 56,250 / $ 60,750

(incl. surcharge)