John M Armleder

John M. Armleder’s career spans more than five decades and encompasses many of the major aesthetic developments associated with this period. Closely affiliated with the Fluxus movement in Geneva during the 1960s, he co-founded the Ecart group with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner in 1969. In the 1980s, he became associated with Neo-Geo, or Neo-Geometric Conceptualism. Known for the diversity of his practice, Armleder combines the experimental spirit of Fluxus with abstract painting, readymades, sculpture, performance, and large-scale installation. As a painter, sculptor, and performance artist, he continually questions what art is, what it can do, and what artistic conventions permit. Ranging from small-scale installations and abstract paintings to geometric compositions, furniture sculptures, and patterned wallpapers, his work draws—by his own admission—on Suprematist painting, Minimalist sculpture, Concrete art, and Dadaist readymades, among other movements. His works are held in numerous prominent institutional collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Long Museum in Shanghai; the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the Kunstmuseum Basel; Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.