Jean Tinguely
Swiss sculptor (1925–1991)
Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (known officially as Métamatics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.
Life
Born in Fribourg, Tinguely grew up in Basel. At fifteen he traveled to Albania, with the intention of joining the fight against the forces of Benito Mussolini and the fascist regime then ruling Italy as they took over the nation, but instead he was apprehended at border and imprisoned for three days. From 1941 to 1945, he studied under artist Julia Ris at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel, where he encountered the work of Kurt Schwitters and other Dadaists, which later influenced his kinetic constructions.
Tinguely married fellow Swiss artist Eva Aeppli in 1951.
He moved to France in 1952 with his first wife, Swiss the aforementioned Eva Aeppli, to pursue a career in art. He belonged to the Parisian avant-garde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New Realist's manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960.
His best-known work, a self-destroying sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), only partially self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, although his later work, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), detonated successfully in front of an audience gathered in the desert outside Las Vegas.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean Tinguely” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.