John M. Armleder

John M. Armleder

Untitled, 2009

Mehdi Chouakri

John Armleder (born 1948, in Geneva) is a Swiss performance artist, painter, sculptor, critic, and curator. His work is based on his involvement with Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s, when he created performance art pieces, installations and collective art activities that were strongly influenced by John Cage. However, Armleder's position throughout his career has been to avoid associating his artistic practice with any type of manifesto.

Armleder was born as the son of a hotelier (owners of Le Richemond). He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Geneva (1966-7) and at the Glamorgan Summer School, Britain (1969).

In 1969, with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, Armleder founded the Groupe Ecart in Geneva, from which stemmed the Galerie Ecart and its associated performance group and publications. The Groupe Ecart was particularly important in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, not only through its activity as an independent publishing house, but also because it introduced in Switzerland—and sometimes in Europe—a large number of notable artists, including Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Armleder was later associated with Neo-Geo artistic movement and was often referred to as the "darling" of the New York art critics in this period (1980s).

Armleder frequently examines the context in which art is displayed and views the exhibition as a medium in its own right. Since the 1990s, he has created installations, paintings, wall paintings, sculptures and what he calls Furniture Sculptures—installations that usually juxtapose furniture with monochrome or abstract paintings, either literally on the furniture or on a canvas hanging nearby. His work has varied greatly in form, and has, since the beginning, used chance as a method of producing the final forms that pieces take, much like John Cage. He often uses a dense scenographic hanging style, putting individual works into close proximity and creating installation-like exhibitions.

Co-founder of the Ecart Group (1969) and closely affiliated with the Fluxus movement, visual artist John M Armleder has since the end of the 1960's created a polymorphic body of work which encompasses performance, drawings, sculptures and paintings. Generally characterized by a sense of deep interconnectedness between life and art, and the appropriation of objects and quotes, his work is loaded with a set of influences and references which elude피하다 the modernist vernacular as well as any form of classification. Armleder gained international recognition with his Furniture Sculpture series from 1979, bringing together iconic examples of design and paintings to reflect on the trivialization of the artwork as an ornamental accessory. The artist is also recognized for his celebrated series of Pour and Puddle Paintings. "These works, born from his admiration for Larry Poons, and in accord with Armleder's larger practice, do not hide the strategy of their fabrication nor the significance of their own process: conjuring a time liberated from formal constraints, moral obligations, and the conventions of taste and style." (Extract from Stephanie Moisdon, ‘La Bruche du Haricot’, Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, 2015).

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