During World War II, in 1942, his father was murdered by the Nazis in Romania and the family was forced to take refuge in Switzerland, in Zurich, where he began to study dance, and then, having moved to Paris, he became a ballet star, then a choreographer and then an assistant director. In the meantime, he began to frequent artistic circles, with Tinguely, Pol Bury, Jesús Rafael Soto, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Picasso. Also in Paris, he began his work as a figurative artist: he invented the tableaux-pièges (Trap-pictures), gluing everyday objects piled up in his hotel room (room 13 of the Hôtel Carcassonne) onto boards, which acquire an unusual presence in the transition from the horizontal to the vertical plane. In 1960, he developed, with Pierre Restany, the Manifesto of Nouveau Réalisme. In 1968 he opened the Spoerri restaurant in Düsseldorf, where he served food prepared by himself and then opened, in the rooms above the restaurant, the Eat Art Galerie, which was also the publisher of numerous publications of his and other artists. Other art forms derived from the restaurant were the paintings made by gluing leftovers and dirty plates, as they were left by customers, the collections of cooking recipes and extravagant gastronomic rituals that became performances. He also went through the Fluxus movement. He also began to practice sculpture, which found its natural place in the 90s, when he built a park-museum where he collected his own works and those of his artist friends: thus he opened the Daniel Spoerri Garden, in Seggiano, Tuscany, where he settled. The last part of his life he lived and worked in Vienna.