The Museum Tinguely is an art museum in Basel, Switzerland that contains a permanent exhibition of the works of Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely. Located in the Solitudepark by the Rhine, the museum was designed by the architect Mario Botta.
A variety of Tinguely's kinetic art sculptures are on permanent display, complemented with illustrations, photographs and other documents related to the artist's life and work. Tinguely's wife, Niki de Saint Phalle has donated 55 sculptures to the museum.
Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 - 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (known officially as metamechanics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.
He was born in Fribourg, Tinguely grew up in Basel, but moved to France in 1952 with his first wife, Swiss artist Eva Aeppli, to pursue a career in art. He belonged to the Parisian avantgarde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New Realist's manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960.
His best-known work, a self-destroying sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), only partially self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, although his later work, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), detonated successfully in front of an audience gathered in the desert outside Las Vegas.
Tinguely married fellow Swiss artist Eva Aeppli in 1951. In 1971, he married his second wife, Niki de Saint Phalle with whom he collaborated on several artistic projects, such as the Hon - en katedral or Le Cyclop.
Tinguely died at the age of 66 years in the Bern Hospital of heart failure.