DANIEL SPOERRI. I Like Contradictions – in Dialogue with Works from the Falckenberg Collection Cat. Falckenberg Collection

The exhibition » I Love Contradictions« at the Sammlung Falckenberg offers a new perspective on the work of Daniel Spoerri (1930– 2024) and the enduring relevance of his artistic thinking. After his first career as a classical dancer, Spoerri co-founded the Nouveaux Ré alistes group in Paris in 1960 together with Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and other fellow artists, evolving into a formative representative of object art. Distancing himself from abstract art and building on the readymades and Neo-Dada of the 1960s, Spoerri created his own art genre with his » snare pictures« and established Eat Art in the 1970s. In dialogue with works from the Sammlung Falckenberg, the diverse connections between Daniel Spoerri’ s artistic approach and the consumer-critical and socially critical stances found in the collection unfold. Artists like Dieter Roth or Emmett Williams were companions of Spoerri’ s during the 1960s and 70s; Gianfranco Baruchello, Ö yvind FahlstrÖ m, and Spoerri exhibited together with the Nouveaux Ré alistes for the first time in New York in 1962. Material-aesthetic and conceptual parallels can in turn be found in the work of Mark Dion, Mariella Mosler et.al.

Barbara Rä derscheidt, b. 1959, comes from a family where art was part of everyday life. Her grandmother, Martha Hegemann, her grandfather, Anton Rä derscheidt, and her father, Karl Anton Rä derscheidt, were all painters; her great-aunt was a painter, and her siblings were also artistically active. For Barbara Rä derscheidt, working artistically is therefore a matter of course; her focus is on working with objects. Dirk Luckow, b. 1958, has been the General Director of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg since 2009. He graduated 1996 with a dissertation on Joseph Beuys and the American Anti-Form-Art. Luckow has since worked at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dü sseldorf, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Wü rttembergische Kunstverein in Stuttgart. He also worked as project manager for visual arts at the Siemens Arts Program in Munich, before he became Director of the Kunsthalle zu Kiel from 2002 to 2009. Belinda Grace Gardner, b. 1960, is a scholar of literature and art history. She works in Hamburg as a freelance critic, author, and curator in the field of contemporary art. She teaches at, among other institutions, the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (specializing in theory and history) and Leuphana University Lü neburg. Her research focuses on visual concepts of romantic love and the ephemeral, as well as (re)constructions of reality, identity, memory, place, and space in contemporary art.