Jean Tinguely

JEAN TINGUELY (Switzerland, 1925–1991).
Untitled, 1991, from the “Olympic Suite” series.
Lithograph on 270-gram Arches Vélin paper, print no. 68/250.
Signed on the plate and numbered by hand.
This work is part of the “Olympic Centennial Suite.”
Measurements: 90 x 63 cm.
The Olympic Suite consists of 50 lithographs and silkscreen prints selected to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centennial of the modern Olympic movement. The selected artists work in a wide variety of movements and styles, ranging from Antonio López’s hyperrealism to Sol Lewitt’s abstraction, including Abstract Expressionism, Arden Quin’s geometric art, Conceptual Art, Pop Art, the New Realism of Baldaccini and Rotella, and the New Fauvism of Dokoupil, among others. Among the artists represented 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 movement based on the aesthetics of movement. It has been expressed through sculpture, a medium in which the distinctive elements are the moving components of the works. Its purpose is to provide the viewer with a spectacle of movement—or, at the very least, the illusion of it. Jean Tinguely’s kinetic works were created to be destroyed or to 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 early works, exhibited in Paris, were powered by electric motors. These monumental pieces depicted an ironic universe of useless machines that, it seemed, were in the process of production. 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 rather that its creative capacities are, in truth, the potentialities bestowed upon it by both the artist and the viewers.”