Museum Tinguely

Kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely is one of those artists you either love or hate. But Tinguely sceptics have been known to unknit their brows, smile and even laugh out loud in Basel’s temple to its favourite cog-bothering, wheel-wrangling, rotor-repurposing son. Trained at Basel’s arts and crafts school between 1941 and 1944, Tinguely went on to hone a discipline he called ‘méta-mécaniques’, first as part of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s, building fantastical installations from mechanical components and unwieldy chunks of industrial detritus. Self-destruction was the intrinsic mission of many works, such as 'Homage To New York', which blew itself up for an invited audience in the garden of New York’s MOMA in 1960. But most were ruggedly built to last, and it’s the sheer scale of this museum’s collection that makes it irresistible, even to non-believers. The central hall alone houses 20 huge machine-sculptures in a handsome, hangar-like structure purpose-built next to the Rhine by Ticino architect Mario Botta, and the work on show also includes drawings, historic exhibition posters, catalogues and photographs. An imaginative programme of temporary exhibitions ups the offer further still.