FLUXLIST: Daniel Spoerri: May 11, NYC

[Emily Harvey Gallery, 537 Bway, NYC]

<bold><fontfamily><param>Helvetica</param><bigger>Emily Harvey
Gallery Press Release

537 Broadway at Spring=20

New York, NY 10012

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<center><bold>DANIEL SPOERRI:  <italic>Le Cabinet Anatomique

</italic>May 11th to June 10, 2000

Reception for artist: Wednesday, May 24th, 6:00-8:00

Exhibition Catalog Available

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</bold></bigger></fontfamily><bigger>Emily Harvey is proud to present a
series of new works by <bold>Daniel Spoerri</bold>: assemblages for
which Spoerri has found his starting point in a suite of original
surgical lithographs from l839 by N.H. Jacob, a student of Jean-Louis
David. He "completes" these exquisitely drawn illustrations with
carefully overlaid objects.  This group of works is the third (and
currently final) part of a larger series entitled <bold><italic>Le
Cabinet Anatomique</italic></bold>.=20


Spoerri is an inveterate collector of the most curious expressions of
human creativity, retrieving such objects, as he retrieved the original
graphics to which he applied them, from Europe's various flea markets.
The works are small in scale and display an eerie, jewel-like
precision; and though the images are often cruel, they are presented
with great equanimity.


The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog on <italic>Le
Cabinet Anatomique</italic>  published by the Emily Harvey Gallery with
a text by the art critic Otto Hahn, translated and introduced by Henry
Martin.


Born in Rumania in l930, Daniel Spoerri is one of our era's most
versatile  talents: in addition to being a visual artist, he has also
been a dancer, choreographer and theater director, as well as the
editor of a magazine of concrete poetry. He  moved from Switzerland  to
Paris at the end of the l950s where he became connected with the group
of the Nouveaux R=E9alistes: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman and Martial
Raysse. In l962, he also took part in the first Fluxus Festival of New
Music, in Wiesbaden. In l968 he opened the Eat Art Gallery in
D=FCsseldorf, which produced and presented edible works of art by
contemporary artists.=20


The l960s were the period of his first <italic>tableaux pi=E8ges</italic>
or  "snare pictures," in which chance arrangements of objects, on
tables or in drawers, were "snared" and fixed into permanent place
exactly the artist  found them. These works were followed by "false
snare pictures," in which the composition had been thoroughly planned,
even while creating  the impression of having been determined by
chance.


The notion of chance as a guiding principle of Spoerri's work was
succinctly formulated by the little book which he published in l962,
entitled La <italic>Topographie anecdot=E9e du hasard </italic>
(republished in l966 by The Something Else Press in the English
translation of Emmett Williams as <italic>An Anecdoted Topography of
Chance</italic>) in which he records all the objects found on the table
of his Paris hotel room on October 17th, l961 at 4:17 p.m., also
evoking the memories they subsequently brought back to him.


Later phases of Spoerri's work were guided by mottoes or titles such as
<italic>d=E9trompe-l'oeil</italic> (undeceiving the eye), <italic>pi=E8ges
=E0 mots</italic>  (word traps), or <italic>pi=E8ges =E0     hommes</italic>
(man traps), all of which can be seen as variations on the "snare
picture,"  in the sense that the artist exacerbates the literal
meanings of images to the point  finally of derouting them into
absurdity. =20


Daniel Spoerri currently lives and works in Tuscany, Italy, on a farm
in the town of Seggiano, where he is constructing a monumental
sculpture garden that includes the work of many of his friends, in
addition to his own.


Daniel Spoerri will be present for a reception Wednesday, May 24. This
occasion marks his first visit to the United States since l975.



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