Detail

„Henchman of chance, this could be my job description. “ At the beginning of the Sixties Daniel Spoerri develops the idea of the trap painting from the intention to create art in the context of everyday experience. Chance arrangements of objects are fixed unchanged on their underlay, the object as it were fall into Spoerri’s trap. Only their position in relation to the spectator is changed. By tilting the everyday horizontal plane into the vertical, the result is removed from is natural environment and declared the artwork. “Hahn’s Supper” was created at the explicit request by collector Wolfgang Hahn and is the result of a studious planning. On the occasion of the picture’s production a supper is held on Hahn’s house on May the 23rd of 1964 in which 16 people took part. The invited guests are furnishers at the same time and have to bring their own crockery. Daniel Spoerri is both cook and master of ceremonies, he decides when the meal is over, then trades the cooking pot for a glue pot and freezes the chance composition as a kind of three-dimensional snapshot. Expanding this principle the artist founded the restaurant Spoerri in 1968 in Düsseldorf, where guests could have their table mummified after the end of dinner.