The Swiss artist Jean Tinguely had a distinctly playful idea of sculpture: his dynamic machines were agents of chaos, often on the brink of tipping over or self-destructing. To mark the centenary of Tinguely’s birth, the Musée Rath in Geneva is capturing his anarchic approach to art – and conjuring the spirit of a 1983 exhibition Tinguely curated at the museum – by mounting a lively non-chronological display of some 30 of his mechanical sculptures (until 7 September). Highlights include the cheekily morbid altarpiece Fountain of Death (1989); Cercle et carré-Éclatés (1981), an 18-metre assemblage of spinning wheels and sweeping appendages that recalls Rube Goldberg machines; and Le chien de Niki (1981), a homage to the hound that was so dear to Tinguely’s collaborator and wife Niki de Saint Phalle. Before they sprang to three-dimensional life, Tinguely’s creations existed as drawings, and some 40 of these will be on show to convey the calculation behind the orchestrated chaos.
Find out more from the Musée Rath’s website.
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