Jean Tinguely was born in Basel in 1925 and became a major artist interested in producing movement above all. He studied painting in Basel between 1940 and 1944 and settled in Paris in 1953. In the meantime he gave up painting feeling that it only offered limited scopes.
As soon as he arrived in Paris Tinguely produced animated reliefs with moon-like crescents mounted on axles, pivoting at different speeds and offering various combinations.
He also made recipients in which a kind of fly attached to a rod linked to a central axis was rotating in a kind of mad movement and hurting the rim of the recipient making a tinkling and deafening noise.
Tinguely then produced the «Metamechanic» assemblages with wires, wood sticks, cardboard, metal disks, pulleys, gears made of ropes developing amusing rotations in space, which sometimes broke down.
In 1953 Tinguely made the «Prayers' mill» and in 1955 a Sound Relief with bottles, pots and boxes of all sorts. In 1958, he produced the Space excavator and the Monochrome Perforator with Yves Klein and exhibited his Concert for Seven Paintings, the sound of which was almost inaudible.
«Metamatic N°17», exhibited in 1959 at the first paris Biennial, was his most performing painting machine, which was producing on demand abstract drawings and paintings in an awful and trepidating noise.
His first one-man exhibition had already taken place in 1954 in Paris and ensured his celebrity. Tinguely then took part in many exhibitions in France and abroad.
He continued to build delirious machines, notably in 1960 with his Homage to New York, a gigantic accumulation of old machines, which were being destroyed while running. Tinguely was then an attentive viewer of his creation not knowing what it would generate once it was tuned on.
This led him to scour the world looking for materials and machines he would use for his happenings, which he organised in Figueiras, Venice, Stockholm, Amsterdam, in the Nevada desert and elsewhere.
His work «Hon» was a 27-metre long construction in the shape of a procreating woman in which was installed a bar, a planetarium, a terrace, a cinema and a «love tunnel».
«The Earth Paradise» was like a fight between his crazy machines and Niki de Saint-Phalle's «Nanas» but after producing self-destructive machines, he turned to making kinetic sculptures, like «Copulations» in 1965-66.
Two interpretations of Tinguely's works are being offered, the first being a buoyant celebration of the machine, the second implying an opposition between the invading role of the machine in modern times and its eventual inutility.
Tinguely, who lived with Niki de Saint-Phalle from 1960, died in 1991.
His funeral in Switzerland was the occasion of an incredible and joyful ceremony in which his machines played a major role.
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