Art Exhibition in Milan heralds the start of the Tinguely anniversary celebrations

On May 22, 2025, the Swiss machine artist Jean Tinguely would have celebrated his 100th birthday. The anniversary is being celebrated internationally with exhibitions. Starting on Thursday, a retrospective will be held at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca art gallery in Milan.

Almost forty works from all of Jean Tinguely's (1925-1991) creative phases will be on display in the hall where locomotives were once built. These include large light sculptures and machine constructions, but also small filigree structures that seem almost lost in the 5000 square meter hall, which is over ten meters high.

Among them is the Méta-Herbin from 1950, one of the filigree wire machines with which Tinguely set the work of fellow artists - in this case Auguste Herbin - in motion. The work is on loan from the Fondation Grandur pour l'art in Geneva. Other lenders include the automobile companies Mercedes and Renault as well as the Esther Grether Family Collection in Basel. They are all represented with rarely exhibited masterpieces by the machine artist.

However, a good half of the works, and therefore the majority, come from the collection of the Museum Tinguely in Basel. The institution has sent works from its collection to Milan before they embark on another extensive journey. A whole series of museums want to pay tribute to Tinguely around the time of his 100th birthday.

The exhibition at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan will run until February 2, 2025, followed by the Museum Lembruck in Duisburg in March. And in June, the Centre Pompidou in Paris will open the newly renovated Grand Palais exhibition palace with an exhibition of works by Tinguely, his temporary partner Niki de Saint Phalle and Pontus Hultén.

The Museum Tinguely Basel will celebrate the actual birthday on May 22, 2025 with a big party. In memory of Tinguely's Crocodrome de Zig et Puce, which was developed in 1977 as a kind of ghost train for the Centre Pompidou, the museum will create its own ghost train in Solitude Park in collaboration with selected artists.