Auditorium du Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain.
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For John M. Armleder’s first gallery exhibition in Geneva in a decade we are presenting rarely-before-seen sculptures and works on paper, spanning from the 1960s to today.
They are small-scale and intimate, and important in bearing witness to Armleder’s Fluxus influence, and early exploratory research, showcasing his inexhaustible needs for experimentation and varied production, and presaging his recent large-scale paintings and installations.
The two groups of works shown at Lovay Fine Arts reflect the strategies of chance and indeterminacy John Armleder developed early on in his practice. In this exhibition, all of the works were made from his collections of found objects.
The seven boxes were created in homage to two artists important to Armleder at this period: Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) for the boxes, and George Brecht (1926–2008) for chance-based process. All of them are made with found, collected, or purchased objects moving freely within the boxes, and generate unexpected compositions each time the boxes are opened. They are small and autonomous universes, like little experiments in composition.
The six wall-mounted glass boxes, Quelques objets volants (1967–1975) were shown in Armleder’s eponymous exhibition at Galerie Gaetan (in Carouge, Geneva) in 1975 and feature a mix of glued and unglued loose objects behind a glass, whilst in Wanderer Fantasy (1977) all the objects move freely and is displayed on a pedestal.
The second group consists of six time-defying collages. In the 1960s, Armleder collected playing cards during his urban dérives, which he has kept ever since. In the summer of 2024 he made use of these cards to create the collages on show – in keeping with one of the artist’s most important commitments: not to separate his series by period but to continue them throughout his career.
These collages embody his obsession with appropriation and repetition of objects, signs and images. Some cards show their face, others their verso, and create a witty take on the artistic debates about abstraction and figuration, the decorative and the conceptual, the serious and the superficial, high and low culture — questioning the Status-quo that is a major component of Armleder’s philosophy.
Similar works were shown in the survey “About Nothing, Works on paper, 1964 – 2004” at Kunsthalle Zürich, ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia and the South London Gallery, London.
In addition, we are showing in our office space three recent Puddle Paintings on canvas and two lithograph from the Pour Paintings series.
→The exhibition continues at Olivier Varenne, Art moderne & Contemporain, 37-39 rue des Bains, Geneva. www.varenne.art