A major retrospective exhibition of Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri's work at Hamburg's Deichtorhallen reveals both the revolutionary nature of his art and the challenges of presenting his prolific output. The exhibition, titled "I Love Contradictions," spans approximately 65,000 square feet across five floors of the Phoenix Halls, showcasing the work of an artist who sought to radically merge reality with art.
Daniel Spoerri (1930-2024) was known as a rebellious character who channeled his true passion for food into his artistic practice. His famous "trap pictures" (Tableau piège) captured moments from dinner parties, casual gatherings, and heated table debates. Beginning in the 1960s, Spoerri would fix place settings, food remnants, cigarettes, and wine bottles to tables after meals, then saw off the table legs and mount the entire scene on walls. Never before had art been so directly taken from life, and Spoerri's invention of "Eat Art" fundamentally challenged traditional concepts of painting and sculpture.
Collecting was Spoerri's second great passion, as he cultivated chance encounters and serendipitous discoveries. He would wander through flea markets without specific intentions, purchasing historical kitchen utensils or mannequins that he would later transform into art. As a founding member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, established in 1960, Spoerri belonged to a generation of artists who wanted to brutally merge reality with art, breaking down the boundaries between life and artistic expression.
The current exhibition's curatorial approach, however, presents significant contradictions. While curator Barbara Räderscheidt emphasizes that Spoerri constantly reinvented himself throughout his career, little of this innovative spirit is evident across the five floors of the display. Instead, the exhibition relies heavily on serial repetition, undermining the very diversity it claims to celebrate.
Visitors are immediately confronted with multiple variations of the wordplay "Ça crêve les yeux" (That's eye-catching) at the entrance. All variations show pairs of eyes with scissors stuck in the eyeballs. Spoerri developed these "word traps" with fellow artists like Robert Filiou, creating visual representations of common sayings. However, the accumulation of these works dilutes their impact, and the socially critical points that were directed against the elitist elevation of art appear blunted and ineffective.
This problematic seriality, which would be more appropriate for Donald Judd's entirely different minimalist-accurate objects, extends throughout all floors of the exhibition. One trap picture follows another, with "Eaten by" tables, conceived as portraits of individuals, continuing the pattern. The later arranged "Mosaiques des années cinquante," displayed on mosaic tables from the 1950s, and numerous artist tables that could be described as studio still lifes provide little variation in the presentation.
The exhibition also features Spoerri's 2015 series "What Remains," in which he incorporated knick-knacks, stuffed animals, and plastic plants left over at flea markets in the evening. Even these works appear redundant when displayed in endless rows. Despite the accumulated mass of works on display, early Spoerri pieces are notably underrepresented in this comprehensive show.
The exhibition attempts to create dialogue with works from the Falckenberg Collection, but these connections often seem forced or unclear. While the relationship between Spoerri's work and a drawing of a wrapped building by Christo makes sense from an art historical perspective – both artists were founding members of the Nouveaux Réalistes – other connections remain mysterious. The relationship between Spoerri's life-size bronzes, the Prillwitz Idols, and brutal bronze casts by Jonathan Meese remains unclear. Whether it's the material, the younger artist's reminiscence of the older one, or some other connection, the wall texts remain silent on these curatorial choices.
The exhibition's educational approach appears somewhat sparse overall. At the time of opening, the series "Murder Investigations" lacked proper trigger warnings, despite consisting of reworked photographs of children who died violent deaths. Spoerri intended these intense photo montages to demonstrate that any object could potentially become a murder weapon – memento mori, be aware of the end, was the actual message. The Deichtorhallen later added appropriate warnings, though this response came rather late given current awareness debates about sensitive content in exhibitions.
Spoerri's artistic legacy remains undisputed as one of the great innovators in art history. His revolutionary ideas set new standards while simultaneously disrupting traditional norms and conventions. However, the Deichtorhallen appear to have fallen into their own trap with this exhibition. Faced with the sheer size of the Phoenix Halls, they have obviously become entangled in the mass of Spoerri's prolific output, losing sight of the true power and impact of his artistic vision in the process. The exhibition runs until April 26, 2026, with a catalog scheduled for publication in December by Snoeck Verlag.
