John Armleder

JOHN ARMLEDER (Geneva, 1948).
Untitled. 2001.
Polymethylmethacrylate sculpture.
Size: 234 x 96 x 30 cm.
Since the 1990s, the versatile artist John Armleder has created what he calls "furniture sculptures", pieces which, like the one we are dealing with here, dissolve the limits between sculpture and design. In it he interrogates the contemporary scope of the language of the avant-garde: minimalism, abstraction? He is interested in mixing the elevated and the everyday, the ready-made and the handcrafted piece.
Swiss performance artist, painter, sculptor, critic and curator. He participated in Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s, when he created performance pieces, installations and collective art activities strongly influenced by John Cage. However, Armleder's stance throughout his career has been to avoid associating his artistic practice with any kind of manifesto. In 1969, Armleder founded the Groupe Ecart in Geneva, together with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, from which emerged the Galerie Ecart and its associated performance group and publications. Groupe Ecart was particularly important in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, not only because of its activity as an independent publishing house, but also because it made a large number of notable artists, including Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, known in Switzerland - and sometimes in Europe. Armleder later became associated with the Neo-Geo art movement in the 1980s. In 1986, Armleder represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. In 2004, a retrospective exhibition of his works on paper was presented at the Kunsthalle Zürich (Switzerland), which subsequently travelled to the ICA in Philadelphia. In the winter of 2006-2007, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Mamco) in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted a major exhibition including works from all periods of his career. In April 2013, Armleder had a solo exhibition at the Dairy Art Centre in London. Armleder's work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, the Staedel Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.