Every prize-winner is offered a solo show at the museum and Tinguely claimed his in 1978, when an exhilarating array of his works ended – chronologically speaking – with two that were especially worthy of note: one, called Bettler (Beggar), was a sculpture positioned at the exit that solicited donations to the museum from visitors – as it still does today, only at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn in Switzerland – while the other was Tinguely’s Märchenrelief (Fairy-Tale Relief), a machine sculpture that exemplifies the narrative quality of his art and demonstrates his deep affinity with children, whom he frequently acknowledged to be his most important audience.
A competition that invited children to write a story about the Märchenrelief was launched as a tie-in with the exhibition. It was won by ten-year-old Dietmar Franzen, whose story of ‘The Animal-Loving Frau Meier’ featured several elements from Tinguely’s work, including ‘the always tip-top automobile’, ‘the proud eagle’, ‘the poor frog king’, ‘a pretty silly duck’, ‘a lion that was kaput’ and a ‘racing garden gnome’. At Tinguely’s suggestion, the story, written in Franzen’s own hand, was reproduced as a fold-out leaflet illustrated with photos by Leonardo Bezzola – an action that undoubtedly made both the artist and his work even more popular in Duisburg.