Jean Tinguely

Le monstre ou le cyclope

Fontaine Jo Siffert

 

Biography

He was born in Fribourg Switzerland at the Fine Arts School in Bale, and then he settled in Paris in 1953. Passionated by the movement, he achieved his first Metal-Mechanic shows, robots animated, wires and sheet metal setting in movement geometric shapes.

In 1956, Tinguely got acquainted with Niki de Saint-Phalle, she was a painter and sculptor, and together they were a brilliant couple of artists.

In 1959, at the Biennial in Paris, his painting machines, some kinds of mechanized insects that could achieve abstract paintings. The same year he made homage to New York, an explosive construction which got self destroyed in the MOMA garden in New York that was an illustrative of his thought.

 ‘‘Art : We don’t care about it !’’

Because beyond of art, his “machines happenings” want to be something unseen before, using scrap old iron doomed to dumps in order to produce sculpture machines, reliefs and drawings of various periods in his career.

In 1970, he started to construct his work the “cyclop” in Milly-la-Forêt , a giant sculpture into which you can enter, it was designed together which Bernhard Luginbuhl Larry Rivers, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri and other artists. Work is achieved with the hilp of his assistants namely, Josef Imhof and Rico Weber. You can see the original drawing of his project according to the following table in the gallery of Annie Chevalley.

Other famous sculptures :

In June 1984, unveiling of the “Fontaine Jo Siffert”, a present from Jean Tinguely to the city of Fribourg.
“Meta-Harmonie III-Pandémonium” was created for the Seiben Museum in Japan.

He died in Bern in 1991.

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