Daniel Spoerr: Was Bliebt/Bildertollwut

In 1959 Daniel Spoerri invented the “Tableaux-piège“ or “trap picture” by gluing all of the things that happened to be on a table and then hanging these three-dimensional stilllives on the wall. Kai Schupke has described Daniel Spoerri’s work as follows: “Spoerri collects old things on garbage dumps and flea markets. By collecting unused things that have been marginalized, repressed, discarded by society, objects that have fallen out of their cycle of service, no longer have a place in the order of things he draws attention to the system of culture with its mechanisms of devaluation and exclusion. You have to make reality be seen. Not its sweet-chocolate side, but the clutter, the rubbish, the eaten-off table.” Daniel Spoerri uses the trap-picture principle in various contexts. In a piece titled “Artists’ pallets” he fixates the working tables of befriended artists or glues the contents of drawers with everything he finds in them. Looking back, Spoerri refers to this as “test drillings’. He is always interested in showing a bit of reality. Flea market stands are also part of this. In his series of flea market – trap pictures, the object artist who once described himself as a “henchmanof chance” is taking up his ideas from 1966 again. He has singled out flea market stands where at the end of the day only a few objects remained which no one wanted to by. And this is how the series “What Remains” emerged. A subgroup of this new series was created when Spoerri’s eye was draw to the stands that sell mainly small paintings, drawings and framed art prints. Daniel Spoerri has given these assemblages the title “Picture Madness”)

Curatorial Text by Barbara Räderscheidt