Jean Tinguely

JEAN TINGUELY (Switzerland, 1925 -1991).
Untitled, 1991, from the series "Olympic Suite".
Lithograph on 270 grams Vélin d'Arches paper, copy P.A 35/50.
Signed in plate and numbered by hand.
Measurements: 90 x 63 cm.
The Olympic Suite is composed of 50 lithographs and serigraphs chosen to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centenary of modern Olympism. The chosen artists work in very diverse movements and styles, from the hyperrealism of Antonio López to the abstraction of Sol Lewitt, passing through abstract expressionism, the geometrism of Arden Quin, conceptual art, pop art, the new realism of Baldaccini and Rotella, or the new fauvism of Dokoupil, among others. Among the artists represented there are creators of great international renown, widely recognized by critics.
The painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely was, for more than thirty years, a key figure in the European avant-garde movement. Kinetic art is a current based on the aesthetics of movement. It has been represented in sculpture, a technique in which the distinctive resources are the moving components of the works. Its purpose is 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, were moved by electric motors. Monumental pieces that captured an ironic universe of useless machines that, it seemed, were producing. He applied the term meta-mechanics to refer to his creations. "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 granted to it by both the artist and the spectators."