Jean Tinguely

Galerie Burén, Stockholm

Private Collection, Luxemburg

Collection P. Wurth, Brussels

Galerie Beyeler, Basel

Galerie Renée Ziegler, Zurich (acquired from the above in 1983)

Galerie von Bartha, Zurich

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2012

New York, Staempfli Gallery, Sculptures and Meta-Matic Drawing Machines by Jean Tinguely of Paris, January - February 1960

New York, The Jewish Museum, Two Kinetic Sculptors: Nicolas Schöffer -Jean Tinguely, November 1965 - January 1966

Zurich, Galerie Renée Ziegler, Schwarz auf Weiss – Weiss auf Schwarz, 1986

Basel, Museum Tinguely, Jean le Jeune: Jean Tinguely’s politische und künstlerische Basler Lehrjahre und das Frühwerk bis 1959, September 2002 - March 2003, p. 139, illustrated 

Klagenfurt, Galerie Klagenfurt, Jean Tinguely – was sich bewegt – hält besser, June - September 2003

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, The Spirit of White, November 2003 - March 2004, p. 71, no. 54, illustrated in colour (installation view)

Basel, Museum Tinguely; and Solothurn, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Les Livres de Vie: Eva Aeppli und ihre Künstlerfreunde, January - November 2006

Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, Joyous Machines: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely, October 2009 - January 2010, p. 138 (text)

Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Die Kunst der Entschleunigung: Bewegung und Ruhe in der Kunst von Caspar David Friedrich bis Ai Weiwei, November 2011 - April 2012, p. 147, illustrated in colour (incorrectly illustrated)

Christina Bischofberger, Ed., Jean Tinguely: Catalogue Raisonné Volume 3, Sculptures and Reliefs 1986-1991, Zurich 2005, p. 291, no. 1088, illustrated

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: The mechanical elements are in full working order. Please refer to the department for a professional condition report on the painted elements.
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Jean Tinguely’s uniquely experimental approach to sculpture is unparalleled by any other artist of the Twentieth Century, embodying an innovative fusion of aesthetics and mechanics that posed revolutionary new dimensions for the status of the artwork. The Swiss-born artist’s practice reached a methodological breakthrough in the early 1950s, when he began suspending common household objects and rotating them at varying speeds, thus transforming the objects into kinetic entities and loosening art’s ties to the static moment. Created in a seminal year for Tinguely, Blanc - Blanc + Ombre is a prime early example of the monochromatic kinetic sculptures which Tinguely created between 1955 and 1959.

The curious inner workings of Tinguely’s visionary mechanical aptitude gave birth to a hypnotic tableau of transitory manoeuvres. Utilising bold forms yet articulated within a white on white monochrome schema, this piece enacts an animated dance that relishes in the ephemeral rhythms of abstract shape relations and chance encounters. Other such examples from this important series find places amongst international public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm and Malmo.

1955 was significant year for Tinguely as he arrived at the conceptual title for his sculptures as ‘meta-mechanical’ entities. This conceptual designation elevates the mobile nature of his kinetic sculptures beyond the realm of the utilitarian or entertainment and decidedly into the cerebral. As noted in 1955 by the eminent collaborator and critic who also helped create this term, Pontus Hultén (later named director of the Moderna Museet in 1960): “continually changing movement is a manifestation of chance, which has traditionally been regarded as the least artistic thing of all. The beauty of continual change is being offered as an alternative to absolute final order. Kinetic art seems to be the most radical expression of some of the most important ideas in modern art” (Pontus Hultén, A Magic Stronger than Death, London 1955, p. 32). Akin to a manifesto, these words firmly situate Tinguely within the new avant-garde frontier of his generation; indeed, his unique approach to reality instigated a natural assimilation into the Nouveau Réalisme movement.

The use of concrete materials to convey a sense of weightless movement and motion provides a meditation on the poetics of automated systems; specifically man’s ability to create subsidiary animation and new life through the mechanical. Tinguely’s moving sculptures break down the paradoxical boundaries between artistic creation and the mechanically manufactured. Whereas the former is considered to be a distinctly human form of expression, the artist’s kinetic pieces leave part of the poetic manifestation of his work to the automated performance of his machines. As Tinguely noted, "the machine is an instrument that permits me to be poetic. If you enter into a game with the machine then perhaps you can make a truly joyous machine – by joyous, I mean free” (Jean Tinguely cited in: Calvin Tomkins, Ahead of the Game: Four Versions of the Avant Garde, Harmondsworth 1968, p. 140). With a bold sense of aesthetic simplicity that veils a complex working of constructed systems, Tinguely’s Blanc - Blanc + Ombre reminds us of one of the greatest paradoxes of life: the only stable certainty in the world is perpetual movement and change.