BASEL.- On the occasion of Jean Tinguely’s 100th birthday in 2025, the Museum Tinguely created Tinguely Studies, an open-access online journal serving as a key platform for academic studies of Tinguely’s oeuvre. Tinguely Studies publishes new articles and reissues contributions that have been difficult to access or are particularly innovative, and creates connections between international researchers. The journal aims to highlight unexplored areas of Tinguely’s art, examine the artist’s works from new perspectives, and contextualize it within current theoretical and social debates.

The first issue contains eleven contributions exploring Jean Tinguely’s Baluba series from a post-colonial perspective, artistic self-representation involving taxidermized birds, his letter-drawings within the context of ornamentation, and Tinguely’s political influence in post-war Switzerland. Other topics include the implications of using animal bones in Tinguely’s late work, an ethical as well as ecological perspective on his use of animal and human remains, the hitherto largely ignored theatre and stage project Spectacle empirique (1956), and the Cenodoxus Isenheimer Flügelaltar (1981) seen within the context of theatricality. Other subjects are the echoes of futuristic multimedia experiments in Homage to New York—the world’s first self-destructive sculptural action—the role of anticolonialism in post-war art, particularly in France, and the intellectual exchange between Tinguely and Pontus Hultén in connection with cultural anarchism in the 1950s.

With essays by: Christine Burger, Jenny Körber, Georg Kreis, Barbara Lange, Ara H. Merjian, AnnMarie Perl, Anne Röhl, Pierre Ruault, Fabiana Senkpiel, Sarah Sigmund and Sarah Wilson.

Call for research

Articles for publication should be submitted before 30 August each year.