Daniel Spoerri (1930–2024) took the art of fine dining literally: his tableaux pièges, or ‘snare pictures’, turn the remnants of meals – half-empty plates, bottles of wine, carelessly strewn cutlery – into works of art that transform signs of conviviality into relics. Seizing upon recently vacated tables, Spoerri would glue the abandoned food and crockery to the table, flip it 90 degrees and hang it on a gallery wall like a three-dimensional painting. Though it was these playful works that made his name, this exhibition at the Deichtor Hallen in Hamburg makes clear that there was more to his practice than frozen dinners (27 September–26 April 2026). It tracks his development from around 1960 – when, alongside artists including Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, he took to recycling objects and images from the world around him into assemblages and collages – until 2018. The curators also include works by other artists from the museum’s collection to place Spoerri among his avant-garde peers.
Find out more from Deichtor Hallen’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
