Jean Tinguely

This book was designed to accompany the exhibition of Jean Tinguely’s sculptural machines. The design uses bold, playful typographic elements and raw uncoated materials to capture the spirit of the artist and the era in which he lived and worked.

Nahmad Projects presented the first gallery exhibition of Jean Tinguely’s work in London for almost twenty years. Swiss-born painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely is best known for his sculptural machines, rooted in the Dada tradition and officially known as metamechanics. In a similar fashion to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, Tinguely’s sculptures are machines à penser; they are a stimulating reflection on our relationship with machines, art, and the age we live in.

Tinguely belongs to a generation of European artists who came together in the 1950s and 1960s over a shared interest in the dynamics of life beyond the arts. He exhibited with the international ZERO group, the French Nouveaux Réalistes, and Kinetic artists. Collaborationwas a central aspect of Tinguely’s practice, inviting participation from the public, and creating works with iconic artists including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Daniel Spoerri.

His colourful and often humorous sculptures initially appear as a cheerful celebration of life, but they are also useless, absurd, and sometimes self-destructive. This abjection of the commercial machine satirizes the mindless overproduction of material goods in the advanced industrial society of his post-war world. Optimism is undercut by irony throughout his oeuvre, elucidating his fascination with the idea of play alongside that of mortality. Whirring and clanking, his work goes against the literal “static” conventions of art, and in turn art’s institutions.