For Daniel Spoerri, contradiction was not a contradiction, but a way of life. Between irony and seriousness, food and art, order and chaos, he searched for that peculiar truth that only the everyday reveals when it is lifted from its usual perspective. Now, one year after Spoerri's death, the exhibition "I love contradictions" at the Falckenberg Collection spans seven decades of his work - and shows how radically topical his thinking has remained.

Anyone who enters Spoerri's work enters a theater of chance. His legendary "trap pictures", which have been capturing fleeting moments since 1959, preserve what disappears in the next moment: Traces of a meal, a scrap of bread, a cigarette butt, a glass of wine. The horizontal is erected, reality stands upright on the wall - a gesture of quiet anarchy. There is no triumph of the artist in these frozen moments, but rather a subtle rejection of the hubris of authorship. For every trap painting is a collaborative work: between people who ate, talked, laughed - and the artist who preserved the ephemeral.

Exhibition view "Daniel Spoerri: I love contradictions. In dialog with works from the Falckenberg Collection" © Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Photo: Henning Rogge

The show at the Deichtorhallen, conceived in close collaboration with Harald Falckenberg, is more than just a retrospective. It is a conversation between artistic spirits, between Spoerri's humor and Falckenberg's delight in paradoxes. Four floors condense into a polyphonic dialog between Spoerri and the rebellious voices of the collection - Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Jonathan Meese, Astrid Klein. The result is a space of affinities: an aesthetic of resistance to convention and good taste.
Rarely shown groups of works expand the familiar image of the artist: the bread dough objects created from 1972 onwards, the "Murder Investigations" with their irritating, criminalistic allusions, or the "Threadbare Oracles", in which Spoerri assembles new, poetic-ironic messages from old embroidered cloths. Everywhere one encounters his delight in double meanings, his pleasure in linguistic play, in the reversal of value and meaning.

Exhibition view "Daniel Spoerri: I love contradictions. In dialog with works from the Falckenberg Collection" © Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Photo: Henning Rogge

In dialog with the works in the Falckenberg Collection, Spoerri's work unfolds as part of a larger, anarchic counterculture. His art shares with Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme and conceptual art the attitude that elevates the everyday to a political issue. It calls for the boundaries between art and life to be constantly renegotiated.
Daniel Spoerri, born in Romania in 1930, dancer, stage designer, collector, cook, host - was always more than just an artist. His work was a celebration of chance and community, a play with the ephemeral that resists monumentality. In his "Giardino" in Tuscany, this grew into a landscape of encounters. Now, posthumously, his work in Hamburg pays homage to an artist who never stopped loving life - in all its contradictions.
September 27, 2025 to April 26, 2026
www.deichtorhallen.de