Jean Tinguely (born May 22, 1925, in Fribourg, Switzerland; died August 30, 1991, in Bern) was a Swiss Dadaist painter and sculptor known for his kinetic art. Through his work, he satirized the blind overproduction of industrial society.

Tinguely grew up in Basel, Switzerland, and studied at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts. To develop his artistic career, he moved to France in 1952 with his first spouse, Swiss artist Eva Aeppli. His first exhibition was held at Galerie Arnaud in Paris in May 1954. Tinguely is regarded as one of the avant-garde artists active in Paris in the mid-20th century. In 1955, he joined several artists, including Duchamp and Calder, in an exhibition titled Le Mouvement, which marked the first time kinetic art gained a significant place in art. Tinguely was also among the artists who signed the Nouveau Réalisme manifesto in 1960.

Tinguely married French artist Niki de Saint Phalle in 1971. Their collaborative works include Fontaine Igor Stravinsky in Paris (1983) and Fontaine de Château-Chinon (1988).

Among Tinguely’s best-known works is Homage to New York, created in 1960 at the invitation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Homage to New York was a self-destructing machine that operated for 27 minutes during the exhibition, but the performance did not completely destroy the work. Spectators took away pieces of the damaged machinery as souvenirs [1]. Two years later, at the invitation of the National Broadcasting Company, he created Study for an End of the World No. 2, which was successfully detonated in the desert outside Las Vegas, United States.

Tinguely is known for his mechanical sculptures, known as kinetic mechanical works, and co-founded the avant-garde group Nouveaux Réalistes in Paris in 1960.

Jean Tinguely was interested in combining imagery, sound and movement in his scrap-metal sculptures. His early works were moving reliefs of simple geometric forms. By the late 1950s, he began assembling different components into freestanding mechanical structures—or machines.

Besides making sounds, several of Tinguely’s machines could also carry out an activity, such as drawing or painting. Tinguely also built machines designed to destroy themselves. In 1961, his machine Sketch for the End of the World, designed for an exhibition in Louisiana, sparked a scandal when a pigeon accidentally died during the process.