The Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, whose real name is Daniel Isaak Feinstein, was born in 1930 in Galati, Romania.
Following the murder of his father, who was killed because of his Jewish origins by the Romanian Nazis in 1941. Lydia Spoerri, his mother, succeeded in sending all his family to Switzerland, where all took the name of Spoerri.

In 1949, Daniel Spoerri attended the Zurich School of Dance and Theater and then began a career as a dancer at the Berne Opera (1954-1957), where he became the first dancer.
At the same time, he discovered in Paris the theater of the absurd of Ionesco, Beckett and Tzara. He will decide to introduce it in Bern, notably by organizing the first performance in German of the "Cantatrice Chauve" of Ionesco.

Between 1957 and 1959, he experimented with Concrete poetry with the publication of the magazine "Material". The international success of Mat (Multiplication of Transformable Art) is due in particular to the adhesion of many artists like Duchamp, Tinguely, Soto, Man Ray, Bury ...

In 1960, he was one of the signatory members of the "Manifesto of the New Realism" written by Pierre Restany. The same year, Spoerri made his first models composed of found objects, titled "tableaux pièges" ("trapped tables"), by which the artist quickly gained an international reputation.
The creative principle and the methods of execution for his works are now known - simple everyday objects, sometimes banal (preferably reliefs such as plates, cutlery, ashtrays ...). These objects assembled by chance on a table, a chair, a box, are stuck on the same table in the position where the artist found them.
This set presented on the wall, becomes a painting, a kind of still life, not made from traditional techniques of painting, but composed of objects as trapped by fate.

Between 1961 and 1963, he exhibited at Moma New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the One Gallery Of London.

In 1963, Spoerri began collecting meals at the J. Gallery. He then opened a Spoerri restaurant in Dusseldorf in 1968, serving food prepared by himself, then an Eat-Art Gallery, where he invited clients and artists to make edible works such as Richard Lindner's gingerbread characters or Caesar's barley sugars. He becomes famous by sticking the leftovers and dishes of the meal at the table, as the customer had left them, to make trap tables. He also collects cooking recipes and imagines extravagant gastronomic rites (J'aime les Keftedès, 1970).

In 1972, the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Paris devotes a retrospective. In the 1990s, he gave a one-man show at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

On April 23, 1983, in the Montcel Park in Jouy-en-Josas, Spoerri made an artistic performance, entitled    «The Burial of the Trapped Tables» and also known as  "lunch under the grass": a group of one hundred 'friends' (including artists and writers such as César, Arman, Soulages Pierre, Erró, Jean-Pierre Raynaud ...) are invited to a banquet whose tables, cutlery and remains are then buried in a trench 40 meters long.

He was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1984.