Jean Tinguely

JEAN TINGUELY (Switzerland, 1925 -1991).
"La Camelotte Pour Larry", 1978.
Mixed media (gouache, pen, felt-tip pen, masking tape and sticker collage) on paper.
Signed and dedicated.
Label of The Piccadilly Gallery.
Work exhibited at Art Basel 36.
Provenance: Jean-Yves Mock collection.
Measurements: 21 x 29 cm; 43 x 51 cm (frame).

If anything characterizes Jean Tinguely's production on paper, it is movement, chance and the use of everyday materials intuitively dispersed on its surface. Throughout his career as an artist, Jean Tinguely sent hundreds of illustrated messages to his friends and colleagues in the art world. All these missives had one thing in common: they were written wherever the artist was (in his studio, in a museum or a gallery, in his kitchen, in a restaurant or even on the floor of his home). They had all been created in a totally intuitive way, being carried away by the subconscious and regardless of the place or the time of their realization. Tinguely himself nodded "I draw a lot of things, just as I doodle while talking on the phone. At the same time, I systematically transform these kinds of drawings into messages for my friends, into letters and the like."

The Swiss painter and sculptor was, for more than 30 years, a key figure in the European avant-garde movement. He was known for his "sculpture machines" or kinetic art, rooted in the Dada tradition. He applied the term meta-mechanics to refer to his creations. As in the rest of his kinetic works, his purpose was to give the viewer a spectacle of displacement, or at least the illusion of it. Jean Tinguely's mobile works were created to destroy or self-destruct, all in an effort to satirize the overproduction of meaningless goods manufactured by advanced industrial society. After dabbling in abstract painting, the Swiss artist experimented with movement as a form of expression. His first works, exhibited in Paris, moved thanks to electric motors. Monumental pieces that embodied an ironic universe of useless machines that, it seemed, were producing. "The concept is to show that a work of art is never a definitive object, but that its creative capacities are, in truth, the potentialities given to it by both the artist and the spectators." He also worked with the ready-made, approaching the new realists and the New York assemblage artists. His production, which touched on all the themes that interested the artists of his generation, earned him an important place in post-war Paris, an important figure of the stature of Yves Klein. Jean Tinguely is currently represented in the most important museums around the world, including the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, dedicated to the life and work of the painter, the Tate Modern in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Reina Sofia Museum.