Jean Tinguely Revisited: Critical Re-Readings and New Perspectives

20 - 22 March 2025

Organized by Dr. Sandra Beate Reimann with Roland Wetzel, Dr. Andres Pardey, Annja Müller-Alsbach, Tabea Panizzi and Andrea Absenger.

Museum Tinguely will host the international conference Jean Tinguely Revisited: Critical Re-Readings and New Perspectives. The aim of this event is to encourage, discuss and publish new art-historical research and interdisciplinary analyses of the artist and his milieu. The conference’s principle objective is to critically reappraise Tinguely’s art in the light of today’s issues, theories and discourses.

Although Tinguely experienced his breakthrough as an artist in 1959 and was successfully pursuing an international career by 1960, his work has played a subordinate role in art-historical research for a long time. It was not until the first and especially the second decade of the twenty-first century that his work began to be studied and contextualized in art-historical research as well as in exhibition projects and accompanying catalog publications. Many aspects of his oeuvre have not been explored extensively or have yet to be examined at all. The artist’s pioneering achievements (including performativity, dissolution of sculpture into ephemeral occurrences, choice of material and criticism of consumerism, interactivity, and immersive situations), which in the late 1950s already had a decisive influence on the development and understanding of art, are not well known, considering that writing on the history of sculpture is essentially focused on the development of Minimalism and Postminimalism. At the same time, changes in discourse (performativity and event terms, actor-network theory, and machine concepts) provide scholars with an opportunity to view Tinguely’s work from a contemporary perspective and, most of all, to challenge it critically (especially in terms of gender, postcolonial discourse, as well as animal ethics and aesthetics). With this call, the Museum Tinguely would like to create a platform for the newest research on Tinguely’s oeuvre and inspire scholars to consider it in new ways.

The programme of the conference will be communicated by the end of the year.